American History - Eric Foner (SEAGULL VOLUME 2)

GIVE ME LIBERTY! AN AMERICAN HISTORY SEAGULL FIFTH EDITION Volume 2: From 1865 ★ ERIC FONER Bn ★ W . W . N O R T O N & C O M PA N Y NEW YORK . LONDON Saskatoon M i s sou r . R. en G re . o tle it eR ch h C ll g i de an Gr Rio H Pe c o s R . D A C S. i a R. mb lu E E S n le AS et AL Be DR MEXICO A RA M Coo SIER k In l Co G N A R S E G N S A A C R Kl T a m e n to R. Sa c r A O C l ne an A i ta un Odes S Mo El Paso N im P Llano Estacado I okw T R. Can Albuquerque A la A Santa Fe T su E te Colorado Springs N Ku s k R U R E O N A AL IE a I Queen Charlotte Islands rni 200 400 kilometers N 400 miles lifo 0 200 Ca 0 R Ko di ak Island Alexander Archipelago T EN ID CC E O ADR A M SIERR Mulege Gulf of Alaska O Pe Juneau f lf o a ns F sk tai Gu Ala sM oun I a ds n ni Elia S. P l at Hermosillo Vizcaíno Bay L Se Ale an n Isl utia Iliamna Lake St . R. NEW MEXICO Ciudad Juárez A ing Bristol Bay Anchorage Kenai Peni nsula Steamboat Springs Tucson C Ber Kuskokwim Bay CANADA E R. DESERT A Nuniva k Island KA Fairbanks RANG do Phoenix R. tte Pueblo J ns G i la la Lake Powell A ALASKA Norton Sound ean on Y uk R. E Oc S e wa rd Pe n in su l a G R A N fic BR O O K S SONORAN San Diego do .P Cheyenne P L AT E A U ra ARIZONA Salton Escondido Sea B North Slope Kotzebue Sound St. Lawrence Island i Pa c Beaufort Sea Chukchi Sea Flagstaff Long Beach Tijuana O Pasadena Oceanside ra Black Hills Denver CO LO R A D O Lake Mead o 100 kilometers C h a n n e l Los Angeles Islands lo . COLORADO R Moab ol 100 miles 0 Oxnard N Glenwood Springs C 0 UTAH r ou Casper Laramie Salt Lake City tt l e Hawaii Great Salt Lake Las Vegas Lancaster Santa Barbara eF WYOMING St. George DESERT Po i n t Co n ce pt i o n Hilo + Mauna Loa L Pocatello Great Salt Lake Desert Death Valley MOJAVE Bakersfield + Mauna Kea ake R. U Li HAWAII ha nel kR . M ha A . ui an G eR Pacific Ocean Ch Reg B i g h o r n R. he Kahoolawe E B A S I N CALIFORNIA Maui Lanai Y O iC Qu 'A l ow s t o n e R Ye l Jackson . R Fresno A A D iw T y Sn V Ka Salinas n Honolulu San Jose Monterey Bay Monterey h Molokai E Oahu K L ha N C ai qu i ha au K l A iC ne R ah Kauai n t P R lak Nihau Lake Tahoe . i R. IDAHO G R E A T NEVADA Carson City R MONTANA Idaho Falls A Oakland oa Sa n J Ka u San Francisco Helena I A Reno ur Billings w Sacramento l M Missoula o iss B St. Croix Po i n t Re y e s e nn o lm M U.S. Virgin Islands Caribbean Sea n R. Boise E 50 kilometers Sa L U R. Ca pe Me n d o c i n o St. John 50 miles 0 Walla Walla ama t h R . Tortola Mi l Coeur d'Alene a k e R. Sn S I 0 m bia R. OREGON tte Atlantic Ocean PUERTO RICO W i l l a me Ca pe B l a n co St. Thomas Salem R. Portland 300 kilometers Eugene San Juan Co l u w 150 Spokane WASHINGTON C 0 300 miles o r o e r t t B i 150 C O 0 Tacoma Olympia Sa h e wan ska t c O Seattle Bo Fuca Ca pe D i s a ppo i n t m e n t Calgary R Vancouver Str .o f Cape Ju a Victoria n de Flattery PHYSICAL/POLITICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES en ay R. Ko o t Va n co u v e r Island ny R. James Bay P R A S C D E L T I D Missin N E A L N U H N T C N A a O Apalachee Bay A n ea M Oc lan tic Charleston Jacksonville FLORIDA s R . Ca p e Ca n a v e ra l Orlando Gr an Tampa de AL Matamoros Lake Okeechobee Fort Lauderdale The Eve rg lade s Key West Miami ys Ca p e Sable Ke NT Monterrey Brownsville G u l f o f Me x i c o da Corpus Christi Laredo C Nuevo Laredo Flo ri M of lf Gu I Pensacola Cape Sa n B l a s I . e nc .L St U O A E M T A N L P A I i o R. N P m Savannah ah a R. At eR . he C L Te n A A L Cu P eR . se P A Ca p e Fe a r O ke f e n o ke e Swa m p Tallahassee Mississippi River Delta Oh ab am A lab a Montgomery Mobile Breton Sound D I l li p pi ssi ssi New Orleans ay aya B S U Atchafal Bay A R. ton E R. ri s n i a l P Mi ves Lake Biloxi Pontchartrain Ca p e Lo o ko u t R Ri o O A Galveston G a l Baton Rouge Lafayette Macon Columbus Ca p e H a tte ra s ee San Antonio S Beaumont Houston . ' St. J o h n Austin Plateau GEORGIA L A G r e at Norfolk Dismal R Swa m p Wilmington SOUTH . CAROLINA R. Edwards T DELAWARE MARYLAND e B ay o a n o ke nn ah TEXAS a R. av t Natchitoches Waco ALABAMA RHODE ISLAND NEW JERSEY NORTH CAROLINA Charlotte Columbia P Al Jackson LOUISIANA R. Birmingham I Atlanta Lo n g Island CONNECTICUT New York a Shreveport e R. P P S bin MISSISSIPPI R. Dallas Asheville s ne Chattanooga Ca p e Providence Co d Hartford Delaware Bay Richmond R MASS. Atlantic City Dover VIRGINIA Roanoke Concord Trenton Raleigh Great Smoky Mountains A be e o Sa a R chi t a . rad Fort Worth Ou C A Knoxville Tupelo big o Abilene olo R. L I H Bangor Portland New Haven Philadelphia Harrisburg Baltimore Annapolis Washington, D.C. eD Memphis To m Texarkana az s r land R . A R. R. ARKANSAS R e d R. Br C TENNESSEE Jonesboro Little Rock Lubbock be a Newark Pe n s a s R. Oklahoma City m Nashville te i O h Fredericton s cot ec R . W o MAINE ak r a ob esape z ka OKLAHOMA Amarillo Tulsa Ar Lexington KENTUCKY e a u a t P l Pittsburgh Charleston Frankfort el PENNSYLVANIA WEST VIRGINIA Cincinnati Louisville . Oh i o R ence eb a S . k Columbus D Indianapolis Lake of the Ozarks Springfield nR St. Louis Jefferson City Erie D Ch ns N MISSOURI R. OHIO INDIANA ILLINOIS Independence ge N wr R. I s R. Kansas City Topeka O sa KANSAS A Springfield La R. L Hannibal ie Cleveland Akron Fort Wayne A as h R . L W Er e ak Ke n W Ka R Peoria R. L Toledo Gary no i s R . f t. Boston R. O es T Buffalo T NH C o n n e c t i cut N rio Ont a NEW YORK Albany ake H u dso n R . Lincoln E Wichita ssa Lake St. Clair Detroit Lansing Chicago Cedar Rapids Des Moines De s M oi n C i R. tte R. Omaha L Augusta W h i te M tn s NVT Watertown Port Huron n Burlington Montpelier R. . up R s our Pla Mis A Lo Pe n Québec Lake Champlain are w L IOWA L nadia Milwaukee y N i a g a ra Fa l l s MICHIGAN Sioux City aw n N io b r a ra R . Lake Winnebago ul St . J Montréal R re Ad i r o n d a c k M o u n ta i n s Toronto a R. Oshkosh on s i n i s c Madison W ia i Sioux Falls Green Bay Traverse City on i pp Ba ur s eo rg R. WISCONSIN G k nsul St. Paul M iss is Minneapolis ta La R. Ottawa H so Huron NEBRASKA S N Ottawa e ne er eni r P in Upp la Peninsu we M R. Pierre A Sault Ste. Marie Duluth Lo enn e I E I H Isle Roya l e MINNESOTA es R. SOUTH DAKOTA D up Lake S erior Fargo Jam Bismarck International Falls G S of hn . sR he N or th Red R . o f t uri NORTH DAKOTA Che y A Winnipeg Lake of the Woods So Williston . iR t a h oo c hat e R. an oin a N n ib Lake Michig As si ib R CANADA l l e R. a A pe C Ap gina b Al Nassau BAHAMAS in e POLITICAL MAP of the WORLD Arctic O cea n Scale at equator 750 1,500 miles 0 0 El l esmere Isl and Queen Elizabeth Islands 750 1,500 kilometers Greenland (Denmark) Baffin Bay Banks Island Beaufort Sea Am Chukchi Sea unds Ba Vi ctori a Island en Gulf ffin an Jan May e n (N or way) d Foxe Basin RUSSIA D Alaska (U.S.) Hu Bering Sea slan ian I ds on Hudson Bay Gulf of Alaska Aleut Isl en m ar k ra St it Norw S ICELAND Reykjavik St r Fa roe Islands (D e nm ar k) ait Labrador Sea CANADA Nor Sea UNITED N KINGDOM IRELAND ds Nort h At l a n t i c O c e an Ottawa Montréal London Celtic Sea nel han hC lis g En P FRAN Toronto Chicago San Francisco Los Angeles Nort h Pac i f i c O c e an Hawaii (U.S.) Gulf of Mexico BAHAMAS HAITI CUBA DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Pue r to R ico (U. S . ) BELIZE JAMAICA Galapagos I slands (Ecuador) Quito ST. KITTS AND NEVIS DOMINICA ST. LUCIA ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES BARBADOS TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO Nouakchott CAPE VERDE GUINEA-BISSAU GUINEA SIERRA LEONE GUYANA LIBERIA French Guiana (Fr.) OR OC CO ALGER MAURITANIA SENEGAL GAMBIA MALI BURKINA CÔTE D’IVOIRE (Ivory Coast) Gulf of Gui EQUATOR SURINAME ECUADOR M BEN IN TO GO A GH AN Caribbean Sea GUATEMALA EL SALVADOR HONDURAS Caracas NICARAGUA VENEZUELA COSTA RICA Bogotá PANAMA COLOMBIA SÃO TOMÉ AND PR KIRIBATI Marquesas Islands (Fr.) Asce nsion (U. K. ) PERU SAMOA Apia Canar y Islands (S p. ) Western Sahara (Mor.) Nassau Havana B Algier Rabat Made ira Islands (Por. ) Be r m uda (U. K. ) Mexico City Kiritimati (Kiribati) Ph oe nix Isl a nds Lisbon Azor e s (Por. ) Dallas MEXICO SPAIN Madrid PORTUGAL New York Washington, D.C. UNITED STATES S ou th Paci f i c O cea n Pago Pago Co FIJI ok Nuku’alofa TONGA Isl Papeete an ds Frenc h Poly nesia (Fr.) BOLIVIA Sucre PARAGUAY Asunción Easter Island (C hi le) THE POLES 30° ° 120 NORTH AMERICA °E 150 180° 0 Arctic Ocean ° 120 90° °W 1,500 miles ARGENTINA Montevideo Tr istan D a Cunha Gr oup (U. K. ) Falk land Islands (U. K. ) EUROPE Atlantic Ocean 3 0° 0 1,500 kilometers Buenos Aires CHILE 30° 0° So u t h At l an t i c O c e an URUGUAY 90° 150 Indian Ocean Santiago Rio de Janeiro ASIA 60° ° 120 Southern Ocean 90° Pacific Ocean °E 75°N 90° 60° 75°S ANTARCTICA 150 60°N ° 120 60° SOUTH AMERICA °W 150 Pacific Ocean 60°S Southern Ocean Juan Fernandez Archipelago (Chi le) 60° 30° Atlantic Ocean 180° St. He le na (U. K. ) Brasília La Paz Pi tcai rn Islands (U.K.) Adamstown 0° BRAZIL Lima S outh Ge orgia S outh S andwic h Islands Scotia Sea S outh S he tland I slands S outh O r k ne y I slands So u t h e r n O c e Arc t i c O c e an Franz J osef La nd S evernaya Zem lya Ze m N e w S ibe r ian Islands lya Laptev Sea Kara Sea East Siberian Sea No va ya Sva l bard (No r way) Barents Sea Wrange l Island wegian Sea N EDE RUSSIA Bering Sea Stockholm ESTONIA Baltic Sea LATVIA LITHUANIA RUS. DENMARK BELARUS Berlin POLAND GERMANY BEL. CZECH LUX. REP. UKRAINE Paris SLOVAKIA AUSTRIA MOLDOVA HUNGARY NCE SWITZ. SL. ROMANIA CROATIA KAZAKHSTAN Aral Sea Ca B.H. SERBIA UZ sp Black Sea ITALY MONT. BULGARIA GEORGIA MAC. Rome ALBANIA ARMENIA GREECE TURKEY Me d i t AZERBAIJAN err an Tunis ian Tripoli IRAQ ia rs N’Djamena SUDAN ETHIOPIA O BANGLADESH Dhaka INDIA Andaman Islands (Indi a) (Yem en) SRI LANKA MALDIVES SE Y Chagos Archipelago (U.K.) LES COMOROS Gaborone Johannesburg Maseru SOUTH AFRICA South China Sea Manila THAILAND Gulf of Thailand Philippine Sea VIETNAM CAMBODIA PALAU BRUNEI MALAYSIA SINGAPORE Guam (U. S . ) PHILIPPINES MARSHALL ISLANDS FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA Celebes Sea Borne o KIRIBATI NAURU Jakarta Java Sea Java INDONESIA EAST TIMOR Arafura Sea PAPUA NEW GUINEA SOLOMON ISLANDS Coral Sea ne UE N or the r n Mar iana Islands (U. S . ) TUVALU Timor Sea an IQ Pretoria zam MO biq ZA ZIMBABWE NAMIBIA BOTSWANA TAIWAN LAOS l MALAWI Nort h Pac i f i c O c e an JAPAN Tokyo Ti m or Indi a n O cea n Ch ZAMBIA Sea of Japan SOUTH KOREA ra BURUNDI EL CH Antananarivo MADAGASCAR Réuni on (Fr. ) New Cale donia (Fr.) AUSTRALIA N or folk Island (Aus. ) LESOTHO Sydney Great Australian Bight FIJI VANUATU MAURITIUS SWAZILAND Canberra, A.C.T. South Pacific Ocean Ke r m ade c Islands (N . Z. ) Tasman Sea NEW ZEALAND Tasm ania Prince Ed ward I slands (So. Africa) Islands East China Sea MYANMAR Bay of Bengal Di ego Garci a ANGOLA Cape Town Thimphu n IA AL M S O Mogadishu TANZANIA Dar es Salaam Luanda MB NG KENYA NEPAL Nairobi DEMOCRATIC REP. OF CONGO Windhoek f fO utian Isl ril at CO RWANDA Muscat BHUTAN Kathmandu m ean GABON New Delhi Yellow Sea Su RÍNCIPE Gul DJIBOUTI UGANDA RIAL GUINEA Islamabad Arabian Sea Socotra e Ad Adis Ababa CENTRAL AFRICAN REP. ue CAMEROON YEMEN Mo inea ERITREA Seoul CHINA PAKISTAN BAHRAIN G u lf SAUDI QATAR ARABIA UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Beijing TAJIKISTAN n a Khartoum NIGERIA N Ku NORTH KOREA KYRGYZSTAN AN e dS CHAD MONGOLIA Lake Balkhash AN Ale Ulan Bator OM EGYPT Re NIGER IS TA IS T Kabul AFGHANISTAN IRAN Pe KUWAIT LIBYA K M EN BEK JORDAN Cairo RIA TUR Tehrān SYRIA CYPRUS LEBANON ISRAEL n Se a S ea ea TUNISIA Lake Baikal Astana Barcelona rs Sea of Okhotsk Moscow ds AY NETH. SW RW NO rth a FINLAND Oslo an s S outh Island Crozet Island s Frenc h Southern and Antarctic La nds (Fr. ) Kerguélen Islands Heard Island and McDonald Islands (Aus.) So u t h e r n O c e an N or th Island W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By midcentury, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing p rogram—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each y ear—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees. Copyright © 2017, 2014, 2011, 2008, 2005 by Eric Foner All rights reserved Printed in Canada Editor: Steve Forman Associate Editor: Scott Sugarman Project Editor: Jennifer Barnhardt Editorial Assistants: Travis Carr, Kelly Rafey Managing Editor, College: Marian Johnson Managing Editor, College Digital Media: Kim Yi Production Manager: Sean Mintus Media Editor: Laura Wilk Media Project Editor: Rachel Mayer Media Associate Editor: Michelle Smith Media Assistant Editor: Chris Hillyer Marketing Manager, History: Sarah England Bartley Associate Design Director: Hope Miller Goodell Designer: Lisa Buckley Photo Editor: Stephanie Romeo Permissions Manager: Megan Schindel Permissions Specialist: Bethany Salminen Composition: Jouve Illustrations: Mapping Specialists, Ltd. Manufacturing: Transcontinental Permission to use copyrighted material is included on page A-81. The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition as follows: Names: Foner, Eric, 1943– author. Title: Give me liberty!: an American history / Eric Foner. Description: Fifth edition. | New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016018497 | ISBN 9780393283167 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: United S tates—History. | United S tates—Politics and government. | Democracy—United States—History. | Liberty—History. Classification: LCC E178 .F66 2016 | DDC 973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018497 ISBN this edition: 978-0-393-61565-4 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110-0017 wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ★ For my mother, Liza Foner (1909–2005), an accomplished artist who lived through most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first ★ C O N T E N TS ★ ★ List of Maps, Tables, and Figures xii About the Author xv Preface xvi Acknowledgments xxiii 1 5 ★ “ W H AT I S F R E E D O M ? ” : R E C O N ST R U CT I O N , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 7 7 564 The Meaning of Freedom 566 ★ Voices of Freedom From Petition of Committee in Behalf of the Freedmen to Andrew Johnson (1865), and From A Sharecropping Contract (1866) ... 576 ★ The Making of Radical Reconstruction 579 ★ Radical Reconstruction in the South 16 ★ 590 ★ The Overthrow of Reconstruction 594 A M E R I CA ’ S G I L D E D AG E , 1 8 7 0 – 1 8 9 0 603 The Second Industrial Revolution 605 ★ The Transformation of the West 613 ★ Voices of Freedom From Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé Indians, in Washington, D.C. (1879), and From Letter by Saum Song Bo, American Missionary (October 1885) ... 622 ★ Politics in a Gilded Age 629 ★ Freedom in the Gilded Age 634 ★ Labor and the Republic 1 7 ★ FREEDOM’S 1890–1900 639 B O U N DA R I E S , AT H O M E A N D A B R OA D , 649 The Populist Challenge 651 ★ The Segregated South 659 ★ Redrawing the Boundaries 669 ★ Voices of Freedom From Booker T. Washington, Address at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition (1895), and From W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (1903) viii ★ ... 674 ★ Becoming a World Power 677 18 ★ THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1900–1916 691 An Urban Age and a Consumer Society 694 ★ Varieties of Progressivism 703 ★ Voices of Freedom From Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898), and From John Mitchell, “The Workingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty” (1910) 710 ★ The Politics of Progressivism Presidents ... 715 ★ The Progressive 724 1 9 ★ SAFE F O R D E M O C R ACY: T H E U N I T E D STAT E S A N D WO R L D WA R I , 1 9 1 6 – 1 9 2 0 734 An Era of Intervention 737 ★ America and the Great War 742 ★ The War at Home 746 ★ Who Is an American? 755 ★ Voices of Freedom From Woodrow Wilson, War Message to Congress (1917), and From Eugene V. Debs, Speech to the Jury before Sentencing under the Espionage Act (1918) ... 756 ★ 1919 767 2 0 ★ FROM B U S I N E S S C U LT U R E TO G R E AT D E P R E S S I O N : T H E T W E N T I E S , 1 9 2 0 – 1 9 3 2 779 The Business of America 782 ★ Business and Government 789 ★ Voices of Freedom From Lucian W. Parrish, Speech in Congress on Immigration (1921), and From Majority Opinion, Justice James C. McReynolds, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) ... 792 ★ The Birth of Civil Liberties 795 ★ The Culture Wars 799 ★ The Great Depression 21 ★ 810 THE NEW DEAL, 1932–1940 818 The First New Deal 821 ★ The Grassroots Revolt 830 ★ The Second New Deal 835 ★ A Reckoning with Liberty 838 ★ Voices of Freedom From Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat” (1934), and From John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (1938) ... 842 ★ The Limits of Change 845 ★ A New Conception of America 852 2 2 ★ FIGHTING F O R T H E F O U R F R E E D O M S : WO R L D WA R I I , 1 9 4 1 – 1 9 4 5 861 Fighting World War II 864 ★ The Home Front 873 Visions of Postwar Freedom 880 ★ The American C O N T E N T S ★ ix Dilemma 884 ★ Voices of Freedom From League of United Latin American Citizens, “World War II and Mexican Americans” (1945), and From Charles H. Wesley, “The Negro Has Always Wanted the Four Freedoms,” in What the Negro Wants (1944) the War ... 888 ★ The End of 898 2 3 ★ THE U N I T E D STAT E S A N D T H E C O L D WA R , 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 5 3 905 Origins of the Cold War 908 ★ The Cold War and the Idea of Freedom 917 ★ The Truman Presidency Anticommunist Crusade 922 ★ The 927 ★ Voices of Freedom From Joseph R. McCarthy, Speech at Wheeling (1950), and From Margaret Chase Smith, Speech in the Senate (1950) 24 ★ ... A N A F F L U E N T S O C I E T Y, 1 9 5 3 – 1 9 6 0 The Golden Age 936 940 942 ★ The Eisenhower Era 957 ★ The Freedom Movement 968 ★ Voices of Freedom From Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Montgomery, Alabama (December 5, 1955), and From The Southern Manifesto (1956) 1960 25 ★ ... 970 ★ The Election of 979 THE SIXTIES, 1960–1968 983 The Civil Rights Revolution 985 ★ The Kennedy Years 989 ★ Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency Movement 992 ★ The Changing Black 999 ★ Vietnam and the New Left 1002 ★ Voices of Freedom From Barry Goldwater, Speech at Republican National Convention (1964), and From Statement of Purpose, National Organization for Women (1966) the Rights Revolution 26 ★ ... 1010 ★ The New Movements and 1014 ★ 1968 1024 T H E T R I U M P H O F C O N S E RVAT I S M , 1 9 6 9 – 1 9 8 8 President Nixon 1031 ★ Vietnam and Watergate 1039 ★ The End of the Golden Age Conservatism 1030 1043 ★ The Rising Tide of 1052 ★ The Reagan Revolution 1058 ★ Voices of Freedom From Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (1971), and From Richard E. Blakemore, Report on the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979) ... x ★ CONTENTS 1060 27 ★ F R O M T R I U M P H TO T R AG E DY, 1 9 8 9 – 2 0 0 1 The Post–Cold War World Discontents 1071 1073 ★ Globalization and Its 1080 ★ Culture Wars 1086 ★ Voices of Freedom From Bill Clinton, Speech on Signing of NAFTA (1993), and From Global Exchange, Seattle, Declaration for Global Democracy (December 1999) ... 1088 ★ Impeachment and the Election of 2000 1102 ★ The Attacks of September 11 1105 28 ★ A N E W C E N T U RY A N D N E W C R I S E S 1109 The War on Terror 1110 ★ An American Empire? 1113 ★ The Aftermath of September 11 at Home 1117 ★ The Winds of Change 1120 ★ Voices of Freedom From Opinion of the Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and From Barack Obama, Eulogy at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (2015) Obama in Office 1136 ★ The Obama Presidency Freedom in the T wenty-First Century ... 1130 ★ 1141 ★ 1150 Suggested Reading A-1 The Declaration of Independence (1776) A-23 The Constitution of the United States (1787) A-27 Glossary A-47 Credits A-81 Index A-83 C O N T E N T S ★ xi ★ L I ST O F M A P S , TA B L E S , AND FIGURES ★ MAPS C H A P T E R 15 The Barrow Plantation 570 Sharecropping in the South, 1880 575 Reconstruction in the South, 1867–1877 599 The Presidential Election of 1876 600 C H A P T E R 16 The Railroad Network, 1880 607 U.S. Steel: A Vertically Integrated Corporation 610 The Industrial West 619 Indian Reservations, ca. 1890 626 Political Stalemate, 1876–1892 631 C H A P T E R 17 Populist Strength, 1892 655 The Presidential Election of 1896 659 The Spanish-American War: The Pacific 682 The Spanish-American War: The Caribbean 682 American Empire, 1898 685 C H A P T E R 18 Socialist Towns and Cities, 1900–1920 705 xii ★ C H A P T E R 19 The Panama Canal Zone 738 The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1941 740 Colonial Possessions, 1900 741 World War I: The Western Front 745 Prohibition, 1915: Counties and States That Banned Liquor before the Eighteenth Amendment (Ratified 1919, Repealed 1933) 751 Europe in 1914 773 Europe in 1919 774 C H A P T E R 21 Columbia River Basin Project, 1949 819 The Tennessee Valley Authority 827 The Dust Bowl, 1935–1940 828 C H A P T E R 22 World War II in the Pacific, 1941–1945 870 World War II in Europe, 1942–1945 872 Wartime Army and Navy Bases and Airfields 875 Japanese-American Internment, 1942–1945 891 C H A P T E R 27 C H A P T E R 23 Cold War Europe, 1956 913 The Korean War, 1950–1953 915 CHAPTER 24 The Interstate Highway System 948 The Presidential Election of 1960 980 C H A P T E R 25 The Vietnam War, 1964–1975 1007 C H A P T E R 26 Center of Population, 1790–2010 1034 The Presidential Election of 1980 1058 The United States in the Caribbean and Central America, 1954–2004 1067 Eastern Europe after the Cold War 1075 Immigrant Populations in Cities and States, 1900 and 2010 1090 Origin of Largest Immigrant Populations by State, 1910 and 2013 1093 The Presidential Election of 2000 1104 C H A P T E R 28 U.S. Presence in the Middle East, 1967–2015 1115 Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip 1117 Percentage of Population Below the Poverty Line, 2014 1141 The Presidential Election of 2012 1150 MA PS ★ xiii TA B L E S A N D F I G U R E S C H A P T E R 16 C H A P T E R 25 Table 16.1 Indicators of Economic Change, 1870–1920 606 Figure 25.1 Percentage of Population below Poverty Level, by Race, 1959–1969 998 C H A P T E R 17 Table 17.1 States with over 200 Lynchings, 1889–1918 668 C H A P T E R 18 Table 18.1 Immigrants and Their Children as Percentage of Population, Ten Major Cities, 1920 698 Table 18.2 Percentage of Women Workers in Various Occupations, 1900–1920 700 C H A P T E R 19 Table 19.1 The Great Migration 765 C H A P T E R 20 Table 20.1 Selected Annual Immigration Quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act 804 C H A P T E R 21 Figure 21.1 Unemployment, 1925–1945 845 xiv ★ TABLES A N D F I G UR ES C H A P T E R 26 Table 26.1 The Misery Index, 1970–1980 1045 Figure 26.1 Real Average Weekly Wages, 1955–1990 1046 C H A P T E R 27 Table 27.1 Immigration to the United States, 1961–2010 1091 Figure 27.1 Unemployment Rate by Sex and Race, 1954–2000 1095 Figure 27.2 Women in the Paid Workforce, 1940–2010 1101 C H A P T E R 28 Figure 28.1 Portrait of a Recession 1132 ★ ABOUT THE AUTHOR ★ E R I C F ONE R is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia Univer- sity, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. In his teaching and scholarship, he focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and n ineteenth-century America. Professor Foner’s publications include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy; Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; The Story of American Freedom; and Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. His history of Reconstruction won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. In 2006 he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University. His most recent books are The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and A merican Slavery, winner of the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes and the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, winner of the New York Historical Society Book Prize. ★ xv ★ PREFACE ★ Give Me Liberty! An American History is a survey of American history from the earliest days of European exploration and conquest of the New World to the first decades of the twenty-first century. It offers students a clear, concise narrative whose central theme is the changing contours of American freedom. I am extremely gratified by the response to the first four editions of Give Me Liberty!, which have been used in survey courses at many hundreds of t wo-and four-year colleges and universities throughout the country. The c omments I have received from instructors and students encourage me to think that Give Me Liberty! has worked well in their classrooms. Their comments have also included many valuable suggestions for revisions, which I greatly appreciate. These have ranged from corrections of typographical and factual errors to thoughts about subjects that needed more extensive treatment. In making revisions for this Fifth Edition, I have tried to take these suggestions into account. I have also incorporated the findings and insights of new scholarship that has appeared since the original edition was written. The most significant changes in this Fifth Edition reflect my desire to integrate the history of the American West and especially the regions known as borderlands more fully into the narrative. In recent years these aspects of American history have been thriving areas of research and scholarship. Of course earlier editions of Give Me Liberty! have discussed these subjects, but in this edition their treatment has been deepened and expanded. I have also added notable works in these areas to many chapter bibliographies and lists of websites. The definition of the West has changed enormously in the course of American history. In the colonial period, the area beyond the Appalachians— present- day Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Pennsylvania and New York—constituted the West. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the term referred to Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, and Mississippi. After the Civil War, the West came to mean the area beyond the Mississippi River. Today, it is sometimes used to refer mainly to the Pacific coast. But whatever its geographic locale, the West has been as much an idea as a place—an area beyond the frontier of settlement that promised newcomers new kinds of freedom, sometimes at the expense of the freedom of others, such as native inhabitants and migrant laborers. In this edition we follow Americans as they constructed their Wests, and debated the kinds of freedom they would enjoy there. xvi ★ Borderlands is a more complex idea that has influenced much recent historical scholarship. Borders are lines dividing one country, region, or state from another. Crossing them often means becoming subject to different laws and customs, and enjoying different degrees of freedom. Borderlands are regions that exist on both sides of borders. They are fluid areas where people of different cultural and social backgrounds converge. At various points in American history, shifting borders have opened new opportunities and closed off others in the borderlands. Families living for decades or centuries in a region have suddenly found themselves divided by a newly created border but still living in a borderland that transcends the new division. This happened to Mexicans in modern-day California, Arizona, and New Mexico, for example, in 1848, when the treaty ending the Mexican-American War transferred the land that would become those states from Mexico to the United States. Borderlands exist within the United States as well as at the boundaries with other countries. For example, in the period before the Civil War, the region straddling the Ohio River contained cultural commonalities that in some ways overrode the division there between free and slave states. The borderlands idea also challenges simple accounts of national development in which empires and colonies pave the way for territorial expansion and a future transcontinental nation. It enables us, for example, to move beyond the categories of conquest and subjugation in understanding how Native Americans and Europeans interacted over the early centuries of contact. This approach also provides a way of understanding how the people of Mexico and the United States interact today in the borderland region of the American Southwest, where many families have members on both sides of the boundary between the two countries. Small changes relating to these themes may be found throughout the book. The major additions seeking to illuminate the history of the West and of borderlands are as follows: Chapter 1 now introduces the idea of borderlands with a discussion of the areas where European empires and Indian groups interacted and where authority was fluid and fragile. Chapter 4 contains expanded treatment of the part of the Spanish empire now comprising the borderlands United States (Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida) and how Spain endeavored, with limited success, to consolidate its authority in these regions. In Chapter 6, a new subsection, “The American Revolution as a Borderlands Conflict,” examines the impact on both Americans and Canadians of the creation, because of American independence, of a new national boundary separating what once had been two parts of the British empire. Chapter 8 continues this theme with a discussion of the borderlands aspects of the War of 1812. Chapter 9 discusses how a common culture came into being along the Ohio River PRE FA C E ★ xvii in the early nineteenth century despite the existence of slavery on one side and free labor on the other. Chapter 13 expands the treatment of Texan independence from Mexico by discussing its impact on both Anglo and Mexican residents of this borderland region. Chapter 14 contains a new examination of the Civil War in the American West. In Chapter 16, I have expanded the section on the industrial west with new discussions of logging and mining, and added a new subsection on the dissemination of a mythical image of the Wild West in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 17 contains an expanded discussion of Chinese immigrants in the West and the battle over exclusion and citizenship, a debate that centered on what kind of population should be allowed to inhabit the West and enjoy the opportunities the region offered. Chapter 18 examines Progressivism, countering conventional narratives that emphasize the origins of Progressive political reforms in eastern cities by relating how many, from woman suffrage to the initiative, referendum, and recall, emerged in Oregon, California, and other western states. Chapter 20 expands the treatment of western agriculture in the 1920s by highlighting the acceleration of agricultural mechanization in the region and the agricultural depression that preceded the general economic collapse of 1929 and after. In Chapter 22 we see the new employment opportunities for M exican-American women in the war production factories that opened in the West. In Chapter 26, there is a new subsection on conservatism in the West and the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 27 returns to the borderlands theme by discussing the consequences of the creation, in the 1990s, of a free trade zone connecting the two sides of the M exican-A merican border. And Chapters 27 and 28 now include expanded discussions of the southwestern borderland as a site of an acrimonious battle over immigration—legal and undocumented—involving the federal and state governments, private vigilantes, and continuing waves of people trying to cross into the United States. The contested borderland now extends many miles into the United States north of the boundary between the two nations, and southward well into Mexico and even Central America. I have also added a number of new selections to Voices of Freedom, the paired excerpts from primary documents in each chapter. Some of the new documents reflect the stronger emphasis on the West and borderlands; others seek to sharpen the juxtaposition of divergent concepts of freedom at particular moments in American history. And this edition contains many new images—paintings, broadsides, photographs, and others—related to these themes, brought to life in a vibrant, f ull-color design. Americans have always had a divided attitude toward history. On the one hand, they tend to be remarkably future-oriented, dismissing events of even xviii ★ PREFAC E the recent past as “ancient history” and sometimes seeing history as a burden to be overcome, a prison from which to escape. On the other hand, like many other peoples, Americans have always looked to history for a sense of personal or group identity and of national cohesiveness. This is why so many Americans devote time and energy to tracing their family trees and why they visit historical museums and National Park Service historical sites in ever-increasing numbers. My hope is that this book will convince readers with all degrees of interest that history does matter to them. The novelist and essayist James Baldwin once observed that history “does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, [that] history is literally present in all that we do.” As Baldwin recognized, the force of history is evident in our own world. Especially in a political democracy like the United States, whose government is designed to rest on the consent of informed citizens, knowledge of the past is e ssential—not only for those of us whose profession is the teaching and writing of history, but for everyone. History, to be sure, does not offer simple lessons or immediate answers to current questions. Knowing the history of immigration to the United States, and all of the tensions, turmoil, and aspirations associated with it, for example, does not tell us what current immigration policy ought to be. But without that knowledge, we have no way of understanding which approaches have worked and which have not—essential information for the formulation of future public policy. History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Rather than a fixed collection of facts, or a group of interpretations that cannot be challenged, our understanding of history is constantly changing. There is nothing unusual in the fact that each generation rewrites history to meet its own needs, or that scholars disagree among themselves on basic questions like the causes of the Civil War or the reasons for the Great Depression. Precisely because each generation asks different questions of the past, each generation formulates different answers. The past thirty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of the scope of historical study. The experiences of groups neglected by earlier scholars, including women, A frican-Americans, working people, and others, have received unprecedented attention from historians. New subfields—social history, cultural history, and family history among them—have taken their place alongside traditional political and diplomatic history. Give Me Liberty! draws on this voluminous historical literature to present an u p-to-date and inclusive account of the American past, paying due attention to the experience of diverse groups of Americans while in no way neglecting the events and processes Americans have experienced in common. It devotes serious attention to political, social, cultural, and economic history, PRE FA C E ★ xix and to their interconnections. The narrative brings together major events and prominent leaders with the many groups of ordinary people who make up American society. Give Me Liberty! has a rich cast of characters, from Thomas Jefferson to campaigners for woman suffrage, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to former slaves seeking to breathe meaning into emancipation during and after the Civil War. Aimed at an audience of undergraduate students with little or no detailed knowledge of American history, Give Me Liberty! guides readers through the complexities of the subject without overwhelming them with excessive detail. The unifying theme of freedom that runs through the text gives shape to the narrative and integrates the numerous strands that make up the American experience. This approach builds on that of my earlier book, The Story of American Freedom (1998), although Give Me Liberty! places events and personalities in the foreground and is more geared to the structure of the introductory survey course. Freedom, and the battles to define its meaning, have long been central to my own scholarship and undergraduate teaching, which focuses on the nineteenth century and especially the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction (1850–1877). This was a time when the future of slavery tore the nation apart and emancipation produced a national debate over what rights the former slaves, and all Americans, should enjoy as free citizens. I have found that attention to clashing definitions of freedom and the struggles of different groups to achieve freedom as they understood it offers a way of making sense of the bitter battles and vast transformations of that pivotal era. I believe that the same is true for American history as a whole. No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom. The central term in our political language, f reedom—or liberty, with which it is almost always used i nterchangeably—is deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind’s inalienable rights; the Constitution announces its purpose as securing liberty’s blessings. The United States fought the Civil War to bring about a new birth of freedom, World War II for the Four Freedoms, and the Cold War to defend the Free World. Americans’ love of liberty has been represented by liberty poles, liberty caps, and statues of liberty, and acted out by burning stamps and burning draft cards, by running away from slavery, and by demonstrating for the right to vote. “Every man in the street, white, black, red, or yellow,” wrote the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche in 1940, “knows that this is ‘the land of the free’ . . . ‘the cradle of liberty.’” The very universality of the idea of freedom, however, can be misleading. Freedom is not a fixed, timeless category with a single unchanging d efinition. xx ★ PREFACE Indeed, the history of the United States is, in part, a story of debates, disagreements, and struggles over freedom. Crises like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Cold War have permanently transformed the idea of freedom. So too have demands by various groups of Americans to enjoy greater freedom. The meaning of freedom has been constructed not only in congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and even bedrooms. Over the course of our history, American freedom has been both a reality and a mythic ideal—a living truth for millions of Americans, a cruel mockery for others. For some, freedom has been what some scholars call a “habit of the heart,” an ideal so taken for granted that it is lived out but rarely analyzed. For others, freedom is not a birthright but a distant goal that has inspired great sacrifice. Give Me Liberty! draws attention to three dimensions of freedom that have been critical in American history: (1) the meanings of freedom; (2) the social conditions that make freedom possible; and (3) the boundaries of freedom that determine who is entitled to enjoy freedom and who is not. All have changed over time. In the era of the American Revolution, for example, freedom was primarily a set of rights enjoyed in public a ctivity—the right of a community to be governed by laws to which its representatives had consented and of individuals to engage in religious worship without governmental interference. In the nineteenth century, freedom came to be closely identified with each person’s opportunity to develop to the fullest his or her innate talents. In the twentieth, the “ability to choose,” in both public and private life, became perhaps the dominant understanding of freedom. This development was encouraged by the explosive growth of the consumer marketplace (a development that receives considerable attention in Give Me Liberty!), which offered Americans an unprecedented array of goods with which to satisfy their needs and desires. During the 1960s, a crucial chapter in the history of American freedom, the idea of personal freedom was extended into virtually every realm, from attire and “lifestyle” to relations between the sexes. Thus, over time, more and more areas of life have been drawn into Americans’ debates about the meaning of freedom. A second important dimension of freedom focuses on the social conditions necessary to allow freedom to flourish. What kinds of economic institutions and relationships best encourage individual freedom? In the colonial era and for more than a century after independence, the answer centered on economic autonomy, enshrined in the glorification of the independent small p roducer— the farmer, skilled craftsman, or shopkeeper—who did not have to depend on another person for his livelihood. As the industrial economy matured, new PRE FA C E ★ xxi conceptions of economic freedom came to the fore: “liberty of contract” in the Gilded Age, “industrial freedom” (a say in corporate d ecision-making) in the Progressive era, economic security during the New Deal, and, more recently, the ability to enjoy mass consumption within a market economy. The boundaries of freedom, the third dimension of this theme, have inspired some of the most intense struggles in American history. Although founded on the premise that liberty is an entitlement of all humanity, the United States for much of its history deprived many of its own people of freedom. N on-whites have rarely enjoyed the same access to freedom as white Americans. The belief in equal opportunity as the birthright of all Americans has coexisted with persistent efforts to limit freedom by race, gender, and class and in other ways. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that one person’s freedom has frequently been linked to another’s servitude. In the colonial era and nineteenth century, expanding freedom for many Americans rested on the lack of freedom— slavery, indentured servitude, the subordinate position of women—for others. By the same token, it has been through battles at the boundaries—the efforts of racial minorities, women, and others to secure greater f reedom—that the meaning and experience of freedom have been deepened and the concept extended into new realms. Time and again in American history, freedom has been transformed by the demands of excluded groups for inclusion. The idea of freedom as a universal birthright owes much both to abolitionists who sought to extend the blessings of liberty to blacks and to immigrant groups who insisted on full recognition as American citizens. The principle of equal protection of the law without regard to race, which became a central element of American freedom, arose from the antislavery struggle and the Civil War and was reinvigorated by the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which called itself the “freedom movement.” The battle for the right of free speech by labor radicals and birth- control advocates in the first part of the twentieth century helped to make civil liberties an essential element of freedom for all Americans. Although concentrating on events within the United States, Give Me Liberty! also situates American history in the context of developments in other parts of the world. Many of the forces that shaped American history, including the international migration of peoples, the development of slavery, the spread of democracy, and the expansion of capitalism, were worldwide processes not confined to the United States. Today, American ideas, culture, and economic and military power exert unprecedented influence throughout the world. But beginning with the earliest days of settlement, when European empires competed to colonize North America and enrich themselves from its trade, American history cannot be understood in isolation from its global setting. xxii ★ PREFACE Freedom is the oldest of clichés and the most modern of aspirations. At various times in our history, it has served as the rallying cry of the powerless and as a justification of the status quo. Freedom helps to bind our culture together and exposes the contradictions between what America claims to be and what it sometimes has been. American history is not a narrative of continual progress toward greater and greater freedom. As the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted after the Civil War, “revolutions may go backward.” Though freedom can be achieved, it may also be taken away. This happened, for example, when the equal rights granted to former slaves immediately after the Civil War were essentially nullified during the era of segregation. As was said in the eighteenth century, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. In the early twenty-first century, freedom continues to play a central role in American political and social life and thought. It is invoked by individuals and groups of all kinds, from critics of economic globalization to those who seek to secure American freedom at home and export it abroad. I hope that Give Me Liberty! will offer beginning students a clear account of the course of American history, and of its central theme, freedom, which today remains as varied, contentious, and e ver-changing as America itself. A C K N OW L E D G M E N TS All works of history are, to a considerable extent, collaborative books, in that every writer builds on the research and writing of previous scholars. This is especially true of a textbook that covers the entire American experience, over more than five centuries. My greatest debt is to the innumerable historians on whose work I have drawn in preparing this volume. The Suggested Reading list at the end of the book offers only a brief introduction to the vast body of historical scholarship that has influenced and informed this book. More specifically, however, I wish to thank the following scholars, who generously read portions of this work and offered valuable comments, criticisms, and suggestions: Joel Benson, Northwest Missouri State University Lori Bramson, Clark College Tonia Compton, Columbia College Adam Costanzo, Texas A&M University Carl Creasman Jr., Valencia College Blake Ellis, Lone Star College–CyFair Carla Falkner, Northeast Mississippi Community College Van Forsyth, Clark College A C KN O W L E D G ME N T S ★ xxiii Aram Goudsouzian, University of Memphis Michael Harkins, Harper College Sandra Harvey, Lone Star College–CyFair Robert Hines, Palo Alto College Traci Hodgson, Chemeketa Community College Tamora Hoskisson, Salt Lake Community College William Jackson, Salt Lake Community College Alfred H. Jones, State College of Florida David Kiracofe, Tidewater Community College Brad Lookingbill, Columbia College Jennifer Macias, Salt Lake Community College Thomas Massey, Cape Fear Community College Derek Maxfield, Genesee Community College Marianne McKnight, Salt Lake Community College Jonson Miller, Drexel University Ted Moore, Salt Lake Community College Robert Pierce, Foothills College Ernst Pinjing, Minot State University Harvey N. Plaunt, El Paso Community College Steve Porter, University of Cincinnati John Putman, San Diego State University R. Lynn Rainard, Tidewater Community College Nicole Ribianszky, Georgia Gwinnett College Nancy Marie Robertson, Indiana U niversity—Purdue University Indianapolis John Shaw, Portland Community College Danielle Swiontek, Santa Barbara Community College Richard Trimble, Ocean County College Alan Vangroll, Central Texas College Eddie Weller, San Jacinto College Andrew Wiese, San Diego State University Matthew Zembo, Hudson Valley Community College I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in the Columbia University Department of History: Pablo Piccato, for his advice on Latin American history; Evan Haefeli and Ellen Baker, who read and made many suggestions for improvements in their areas of expertise (colonial America and the history of the West, respectively); and Sarah Phillips, who offered advice on treating the history of the environment. I am also deeply indebted to the graduate students at Columbia University’s Department of History who helped with this project. For this edition, Michael xxiv ★ ACKNOW LED G M EN TS “Mookie” Kidackel offered invaluable assistance in gathering material related to borderlands and Western history. For previous editions, Theresa Ventura assisted in locating material for new sections placing American history in a global context, April Holm did the same for new coverage of the history of American religion and debates over religious freedom, James Delbourgo conducted research for the chapters on the colonial era, and Beverly Gage did the same for the twentieth century. In addition, Daniel Freund provided a ll-around research assistance. Victoria Cain did a superb job of locating images. I also want to thank my colleagues Elizabeth Blackmar and Alan Brinkley for offering advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. I am also grateful to students who, while using the textbook, pointed out to me errors or omissions that I have corrected in this edition: Jordan Farr, Chris Jendry, Rafi Metz, Samuel Phillips-Cooper, Richard Sereyko, and David Whittle. Many thanks to Joshua Brown, director of the American Social History Project, whose website, History Matters, lists innumerable online resources for the study of American history. Thanks also to the instructors who helped build our robust digital resource and ancillary package. The new InQuizitive for History was developed by Tonia M. Compton (Columbia College), Matt Zembo (Hudson Valley Community College), Jodie Steeley (Merced Community College District), Bill Polasky (Stillman Valley High School), and Ken Adler (Spring Valley High School). Our new History Skills Tutorials were created by Geri Hastings. The Coursepack was thoroughly updated by Beth Hunter (University of Alabama at Birmingham). Allison Faber (Texas A&M University) and Ben Williams (Texas A&M University) revised the Lecture PowerPoint slides. And our Test Bank and Instructor’s Manual were revised to include new questions authored by Robert O’Brien (Lone Star C ollege–CyFair and Tamora M. Hoskisson (Salt Lake Community College). At W. W. Norton & Company, Steve Forman was an ideal editor—patient, encouraging, and always ready to offer sage advice. I would also like to thank Steve’s editorial assistants, Travis Carr and Kelly Rafey, and associate editor, Scott Sugarman, for their indispensable and always cheerful help on all aspects of the project; Ellen Lohman and Bob Byrne for their careful copy editing and proofreading work; Stephanie Romeo and Fay Torresyap for their resourceful attention to the illustrations program; Hope Miller Goodell and Chin-Yee Lai for their refinements of the book design; Leah Clark, Tiani Kennedy, and Debra M orton-Hoyt for splendid work on the covers for the Fifth Edition; Jennifer Barnhardt for keeping the many threads of the project aligned and then tying them together; Sean Mintus for his efficiency and care in book production; Laura Wilk for orchestrating the rich media package that accompanies the textbook; Jessica Brannon-Wranowsky for the terrific new web AC KN O W L E D G ME N T S ★ xxv quizzes and outlines; Sarah England Bartley, Steve Dunn, and Mike Wright for their alert reads of the U.S. survey market and their hard work in helping establish Give Me Liberty! within it; and Drake McFeely, Roby Harrington, and Julia Reidhead for maintaining Norton as an independent, employee-owned publisher dedicated to excellence in its work. Many students may have heard stories of how publishing companies alter the language and content of textbooks in an attempt to maximize sales and avoid alienating any potential reader. In this case, I can honestly say that W. W. Norton allowed me a free hand in writing the book and, apart from the usual editorial corrections, did not try to influence its content at all. For this I thank them, while I accept full responsibility for the interpretations presented and for any errors the book may contain. Since no book of this length can be entirely free of mistakes, I welcome readers to send me corrections at ef17@columbia.edu. My greatest debt, as always, is to my family—my wife, Lynn Garafola, for her g ood-natured support while I was preoccupied by a project that consumed more than its fair share of my time and energy, and my daughter, Daria, who while a ninth and tenth grader read every chapter as it was written and offered invaluable suggestions about improving the book’s clarity, logic, and grammar. Eric Foner New York City July 2016 xxvi ★ ACKNOW LED G M EN TS ★ G I V E M E L I B E RT Y ! D I G I TA L ★ R E S O U R C E S F O R ST U D E N TS A N D I N ST R U CTO R S W. W. Norton offers a robust digital package to support teaching and learning with Give Me Liberty! These resources are designed to make students more effective textbook readers, while at the same time developing their critical thinking and history skills. RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS All resources are available through digital.wwnorton.com/givemeliberty5sv2 with the access card at the front of this text. N O RTO N I N Q U I Z I T I V E F O R H I STO RY Norton InQuizitive for history is an adaptive quizzing tool that improves students’ understanding of the themes and objectives from each chapter, while honing their critical-analysis skills with primary source, image, and map analysis questions. Students receive personalized quiz questions with detailed, guiding feedback on the topics in which they need the most help, while the engaging, gamelike elements motivate them as they learn. H I STO RY S K I L LS T U TO R I A LS The History Skills Tutorials feature three modules—Images, Documents, and Maps—to support students’ development of the key skills needed for the history course. These tutorials feature videos of Eric Foner modeling the analysis process, followed by interactive questions that will challenge students to apply what they have learned. ST U D E N T S I T E The free and e asy-to-use Student Site offers additional resources for students to use outside of class. Resources include interactive iMaps from each chapter, author videos, and a comprehensive Online Reader with a collection of historical longer works, primary sources, novellas, and biographies. EBOOK Free and included with new copies of the text, the Norton Ebook Reader provides an enhanced reading experience that works on all computers and mobile devices. Features include intuitive highlighting, note-taking, and bookmarking as well as pop-up definitions and enlargeable maps and art. Direct links to InQuizitive also appear in each chapter. Instructors can focus student reading by sharing notes with their classes, including embedded images and video. Reports on student and class-wide access and time on task allow instructors to monitor student reading and engagement. RESOURCES FOR INSTRUCTORS All resources are available through www.wwnorton.com/instructors. N O RTO N C O U R S E PAC KS Easily add high-quality digital media to your online, hybrid, or lecture course— all at no cost to students. Norton’s Coursepacks work within your existing Learning Management System and are ready to use and easy to customize. The coursepack offers a diverse collection of assignable and assessable resources: Primary Source Exercises, Guided Reading Exercises, Review Quizzes, U.S. History Tours powered by Google Earth, Flashcards, Map Exercises, and all of the resources from the Student Site. N O RTO N A M E R I CA N H I STO RY D I G I TA L A R C H I V E The Digital Archive offers roughly 2,000 additional primary source images, audio, and video files spanning American history that can be used in assignments and lecture presentations. T E ST BA N K The Test Bank is authored by Robert O’Brien, Lone Star College– CyFair, and Tamora M. Hoskisson, Salt Lake City Community College, and contains more than 4,000 multiple-choice, true/false, short-answer, and essay questions. I N ST R U CTO R ’ S M A N UA L The Instructor’s Manual contains detailed Chapter Summaries, Chapter Outlines, Suggested Discussion Questions, and Supplemental Web, Visual, and Print Resources. L E CT U R E A N D A RT P OW E R P O I N T S L I D E S The Lecture PowerPoint sets authored by Allison Faber, Texas A&M University, and Ben Williams, Texas A&M University, combine chapter review, art, and maps. GIVE M E LIBERTY! ★ AN AMERICAN HISTORY ★ S E AGU L L F I F T H E DI T ION Volume 2: From 1865 ★ CHAPTER 15 ★ “ W H A T I S F R E E D O M ? ”: RECONSTRUCTION 1865–1877 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? • What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? • What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the South? • What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the abandonment of Reconstruction? O n the evening of January 12, 1865, less than a month after Union forces captured Savannah, Georgia, twenty leaders of the city’s black community gathered for a discussion with General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, the group included several men who within a few years would assume prominent positions during the era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Ulysses S. Houston, pastor of the city’s Third African Baptist Church, and James Porter, an episcopal religious leader who had operated a secret school for black children before the war, in a few years would win election to the Georgia 564 ★ legislature. James D. Lynch, who had been born free in Baltimore and educated in New Hampshire, went on to serve as secretary of state of Mississippi. The conversation revealed that the black leaders brought out of slavery a clear definition of freedom. Asked what he understood by slavery, Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister chosen as the group’s spokesman, responded that it meant one person’s “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.” Freedom he defined as “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves.” The way to accomplish this was “to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.” Frazier insisted that blacks possessed “sufficient intelligence” to maintain themselves in freedom and enjoy the equal protection of the laws. Sherman’s meeting with the black leaders foreshadowed some of the radical changes that would take place during the era known as Reconstruction (meaning, literally, the rebuilding of the shattered nation). In the years following the Civil War, former slaves and their white allies, North and South, would seek to redefine the meaning and boundaries of American freedom. Previously an entitlement of whites, freedom would be expanded to include black Americans. The laws and Constitution would be rewritten to guarantee A frican-Americans, for the first time in the nation’s history, recognition as citizens and equality before the law. Black men would be granted the right to vote, ushering in a period of interracial democracy throughout the South. Black schools, churches, and other institutions would flourish, laying the foundation for the modern African-American community. Many of the advances of Reconstruction would prove • CHRONOLOGY • 1865 Special Field Order 15 Freedmen’s Bureau established Lincoln assassinated; Andrew Johnson becomes president 1865– 1867 Presidential Reconstruction Black Codes 1866 Civil Rights Bill Ku Klux Klan established 1867 Reconstruction Act of 1867 Tenure of Office Act 1867– 1877 Radical Reconstruction of 1867 1868 Impeachment and trial of President Johnson Fourteenth Amendment ratified 1869 Inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant Women’s rights organization splits into two groups 1870 Hiram Revels, first black U.S. senator Fifteenth Amendment ratified 1870– 1871 Enforcement Acts 1872 Liberal Republicans established 1873 Colfax Massacre Slaughterhouse Cases National economic depression begins 1876 United States v. Cruikshank 1877 Bargain of 1877 • “W H AT I S FREEDO M ? ”: R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 565 • temporary, swept away during a campaign of violence in the South and the North’s retreat from the ideal of equality. But Reconstruction laid the foundation for future struggles to extend freedom to all Americans. All this, however, lay in the future in January 1865. Four days after the meeting, Sherman responded to the black delegation by issuing Special Field Order 15. This set aside the Sea Islands and a large area along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for the settlement of black families on f orty-acre plots of land. He also offered them b roken-down mules that the army could no longer use. In Sherman’s order lay the origins of the phrase “forty acres and a mule,” that would reverberate across the South in the next few years. By June, some 40,000 freed slaves had been settled on “Sherman land.” Among the emancipated slaves, Sherman’s order raised hopes that the end of slavery would be accompanied by the economic independence that they, like other Americans, believed essential to genuine freedom. THE MEANING OF FREEDOM With the end of the Civil War, declared an Illinois congressman in 1865, the United States was a “new nation,” for the first time “wholly free.” The destruction of slavery, however, made the definition of freedom the central question on the nation’s agenda. “What is freedom?” asked Congressman James A. Garfield in 1865. “Is it the bare privilege of not being chained? If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion.” Did freedom mean simply the absence of slavery, or did it imply other rights for the former slaves, and if so, which ones: equal civil rights, the vote, ownership of property? During Reconstruction, freedom became a terrain of conflict, its substance open to different, often contradictory interpretations. Out of the conflict over the meaning of freedom arose new kinds of relations between black and white southerners, and a new definition of the rights of all Americans. Blacks and the Meaning of Freedom frican-Americans’ understanding of freedom was shaped by their experiences A as slaves and their observation of the free society around them. To begin with, freedom meant escaping the numerous injustices of s lavery—punishment by the lash, the separation of families, denial of access to education, the sexual exploitation of black women by their owners—and sharing in the rights and opportunities of American citizens. “If I cannot do like a white man,” Henry Adams, an emancipated slave in Louisiana, told his former master in 1865, “I am not free.” 566 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? Blacks relished the opportunity to demonstrate their liberation from the regulations, significant and trivial, associated with slavery. They openly held mass meetings and religious services free of white supervision, and they acquired dogs, guns, and liquor, all barred to them under slavery. No longer required to obtain a pass from their owners to travel, former slaves throughout the South left the plantations in search of better jobs, family members, or simply a taste of personal liberty. Many moved to southern towns and cities, where, it seemed, “freedom was free-er.” Families in Freedom Family Record, a lithograph marketed to former With slavery dead, institutions that slaves after the Civil War, is an idealized portrait had existed before the war, like the of a middle-class black family, with scenes of slavery and freedom. black family, free blacks’ churches and schools, and the secret slave church, were strengthened, expanded, and freed from white supervision. The family was central to the postemancipation black community. Former slaves made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated under slavery. One northern reporter in 1865 encountered a freedman who had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for the wife and children from whom he had been sold away before the war. Meanwhile, widows of black soldiers successfully claimed survivors’ pensions, forcing the federal government to acknowledge the validity of prewar relationships that slavery had attempted to deny. But while Reconstruction witnessed the stabilization of family life, freedom subtly altered relationships within the family. Emancipation increased the power of black men and brought to many black families the nineteenth- century notion that men and women should inhabit separate “spheres.” Immediately after the Civil War, planters complained that freedwomen had “withdrawn” from field labor and work as house servants. Many black women preferred to devote more time to their families than had been possible under slavery, and men considered it a badge of honor to see their wives remain at home. Eventually, the dire poverty of the black community would compel a TH E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M ★ 567 far higher proportion of black women than white women to go to work for wages. Church and School At the same time, blacks abandoned white-controlled religious institutions to create churches of their own. On the eve of the Civil War, 42,000 black Methodists worshiped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the end of Reconstruction, only 600 remained. The rise of the independent black church, with Methodists and Baptists commanding the largest followings, redrew the religious map of the South. As the major institution independent of white control, the church played a central role in the black community. A place of worship, it also housed schools, social events, and political gatherings. Black ministers came to play a major role in politics. Some 250 held public office during Reconstruction. Another striking example of the freedpeople’s quest for individual and com munity improvement was their desire for education. Education, declared a Mississippi freedman, was “the next best thing to liberty.” The thirst for learning sprang from many sources—a desire to read the Bible, the need to prepare for the economic marketplace, and the opportunity, which arose in 1867, to take part in politics. Blacks of all ages flocked to the schools established by northern missionary societies, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and groups of e x-slaves themselves. Northern journalist Sidney Andrews, who toured the South in 1865, was impressed by how much education also took place outside of the classroom: “I had occasion very frequently to notice that porters in stores and laboring men in warehouses, and cart drivers on the streets, had spelling books with them, and were studying them during the time they were not occupied with their work.” Reconstruction also witnessed the creation of the nation’s first black colleges, including Fisk University in Tennessee, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Howard University in the nation’s capital. Political Freedom In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slaves’ desire for empowerment and equality. As Frederick Douglass put it soon after the South’s surrender in 1865, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” In a “monarchial government,” Douglass explained, no “special” disgrace applied to those denied the right to vote. But in a democracy, “where universal suffrage is the rule,” e xcluding any group meant branding them with “the stigma of inferiority.” As soon as the Civil War ended, and in some parts of the South even earlier, free blacks and emancipated slaves claimed a place in the public sphere. 568 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? They came together in conventions, parades, and petition drives to demand the right to vote and, on occasion, to organize their own “freedom ballots.” Anything less than full citizenship, black spokesmen insisted, would betray the nation’s democratic promise and the war’s meaning. Speakers at black conventions reminded the nation of Crispus Attucks, who fell at the Boston Massacre, and of black soldiers’ contribution to the War of 1812 and during “the bloody struggle through which we have just passed.” To demonstrate their patriotism, blacks throughout the South organized Fourth of July celebrations. For years after the Civil War, white southerners would “shut themselves within doors” on Independence Day, as a white resident of Charleston recorded in her diary, while former slaves commemorated the holiday themselves. Land, Labor, and Freedom Former slaves’ ideas of freedom, like those of rural people throughout the world, were directly related to landownership. Only land, wrote Merrimon Howard, a freedman from Mississippi, would enable “the poor class to enjoy the sweet boon of freedom.” On the land they would develop independent communities free of white control. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land. “The property which they hold,” declared an Alabama black convention, “was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows.” In some parts of the South, blacks in 1865 seized property, insisting that it belonged to them. On one Tennessee plantation, former slaves claimed to be “joint heirs” to the estate and, the owner complained, took up residence “in the rooms of my house.” In its individual elements and much of its language, former slaves’ definition of freedom resembled that of white Americans—self-ownership, family stability, religious liberty, political participation, and economic autonomy. But these elements combined to form a vision very much their own. For whites, freedom, no matter how defined, was a given, a birthright to be defended. For African-Americans, it was an open-ended process, a transformation of every aspect of their lives and of the society and culture that had sustained slavery in the first place. Although the freedpeople failed to achieve full freedom as they understood it, their definition did much to shape national debate during the turbulent era of Reconstruction. Masters without Slaves Most white southerners reacted to military defeat and emancipation with dismay, not only because of the widespread devastation but also because they must now submit to northern demands. “The demoralization is complete,” wrote a TH E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M ★ 569 T H E B A R R O W P L A N TAT I O N 1860 1881 's B ran Master's House C Branch For ll's Sy k ree k Little Riv er Joe Bug Jim Reid Wr Nancy Pope i 's B Cane Pope Church ran Gus Barrow Willis School Bryant h Lem Bryant Gin House Lewis Watson Tom Wright Reuben Barrow Ben Thomas "Granny" Omy Barrow c c h Gin House Slave Quarters Lizzie Dalton Frank Maxey t gh t gh Wr i Little River Sabrina Dalton Landlord’s Peter Tom House Barrow Thomas Handy Barrow Milly Barrow Old Isaac reek C Calvin ranch Tom Tang Parker B or Beckton Barrow yll's F S k Lem Douglas Two maps of the Barrow plantation illustrate the effects of emancipation on rural life in the South. In 1860, slaves lived in communal quarters near the owner’s house. Twenty-one years later, former slaves working as sharecroppers lived scattered across the plantation and had their own church and school. Georgia girl. “We are whipped, there is no doubt about it.” The appalling loss of life, a disaster without parallel in the American experience, affected all classes of southerners. Nearly 260,000 men died for the C onfederacy—more than o ne- fifth of the South’s adult male white population. The wholesale destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery ensured that economic revival would be slow and painful. In 1870, the value of property in the South, not counting that represented by slaves, was 30 percent lower than before the war. Planter families faced profound changes in the war’s aftermath. Many lost not only their slaves but also their life savings, which they had patriotically invested in n ow-worthless Confederate bonds. Some, whose slaves departed the plantation, for the first time found themselves compelled to do physical labor. General Braxton Bragg returned to his “once prosperous” Alabama home to find “all, all was lost, except my debts.” Bragg and his wife, a woman “raised in affluence,” lived for a time in a slave cabin. 570 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? Southern planters sought to implement an understanding of freedom quite different from that of the former slaves. As they struggled to accept the reality of emancipation, most planters defined black freedom in the narrowest manner. As journalist Sidney Andrews discovered late in 1865, “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them. They readily enough admit that the government has made him free, but appear to believe that they have the right to exercise the same old control.” Southern leaders sought to revive the antebellum definition of freedom as if nothing had changed. Freedom still meant hierarchy and mastery; it was a privilege not a right, a carefully defined legal status rather than an open-ended entitlement. Certainly, it implied neither economic autonomy nor civil and political equality. “A man may be free and yet not independent,” Mississippi planter Samuel Agnew observed in his diary in 1865. A Kentucky newspaper summed up the stance of much of the white South: the former slave was “free, but free only to labor.” The Free Labor Vision Along with former slaves and former masters, the victorious Republican North tried to implement its own vision of freedom. Central to its definition was the antebellum principle of free labor, now further strengthened as a definition of the good society by the Union’s triumph. In the free labor vision of a reconstructed South, emancipated blacks, enjoying the same opportunities for advancement as northern workers, would labor more productively than they had as slaves. At the same time, northern capital and migrants would energize the economy. The South would eventually come to resemble the “free society” of the North, complete with public schools, small towns, and independent farmers. Unified on the basis of free labor, proclaimed Carl Schurz, a refugee from the failed German revolution of 1848 who rose to become a leader of the Republican Party, America would become “a republic, greater, more populous, freer, more prosperous, and more powerful” than any in history. With planters seeking to establish a labor system as close to slavery as possible, and former slaves demanding economic autonomy and access to land, a long period of conflict over the organization and control of labor followed on plantations throughout the South. It fell to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency established by Congress in March 1865, to attempt to establish a working free labor system. The Freedmen’s Bureau Under the direction of O. O. Howard, a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine and a veteran of the Civil War, the Bureau took on responsibilities that can only be described as daunting. The Bureau was an experiment in TH E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M ★ 571 Winslow Homer’s 1876 painting The Cotton Pickers, one of a series of studies of rural life in Virginia, portrays two black women as dignified figures, without a trace of the stereotyping so common in the era’s representations of former slaves. The expressions on their faces are ambiguous, perhaps conveying disappointment that eleven years after the end of slavery they are still at work in the fields. g overnment social policy that seems to belong more comfortably to the New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapters 21 and 25, respectively) than to nineteenth-century America. Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes between whites and blacks and among the freedpeople, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts. “It is not . . . in your power to fulfill one-tenth of the expectations of those who framed the Bureau,” General William T. Sherman wrote to Howard. “I fear you have Hercules’ task.” The Bureau lasted from 1865 to 1870. Even at its peak, there were fewer than 1,000 agents in the entire South. Nonetheless, the Bureau’s achievements in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking. While the Bureau did not establish schools itself, it coordinated and helped to finance the activities of northern societies committed to black education. By 1869, nearly 3,000 schools, serving more than 150,000 pupils in the South, reported to the Bureau. Bureau agents also assumed control of hospitals established by the army during the war, and expanded the system into new communities. They provided medical care and drugs to both black and white southerners. In economic relations, however, the Bureau’s activities proved far more problematic. 572 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? The Failure of Land Reform The idea of free labor, wrote one Bureau agent, was “the noblest principle on earth.” All that was required to harmonize race relations in the South was fair wages, good working conditions, and the opportunity to improve the laborer’s situation in life. But blacks wanted land of their own, not jobs on plantations. One provision of the law establishing the Bureau gave it the authority to divide abandoned and confiscated land into f orty-acre plots for rental and eventual sale to the former slaves. In the summer of 1865, however, President Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln, ordered nearly all land in federal hands returned to its former owners. A series of confrontations followed, notably in South Carolina and Georgia, where the army forcibly evicted blacks who had settled on “Sherman land.” When O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, traveled to the Sea Islands to inform blacks of the new policy, he was greeted with disbelief and protest. A committee of former slaves drew up petitions to Howard and President Johnson. “We want Homesteads,” they declared, “we were promised Homesteads by the government.” Land, the freedmen insisted, was essential to the meaning of freedom. Without it, they declared, “we have not bettered our condition” from the days of slavery—“you will see, this is not the condition of really free men.” Because no land distribution took place, the vast majority of rural freedpeople remained poor and without property during Reconstruction. They had no alternative but to work on white-owned plantations, often for their former owners. Far from being able to rise in the social scale through hard work, black men were largely confined to farm work, unskilled labor, and service jobs, and black women to positions in private homes as cooks and maids. Their wages remained too low to allow for any accumulation. By the turn of the century, a significant number of southern African-Americans had managed to acquire small parcels of land. But the failure of land reform produced a deep sense of betrayal that survived among the former slaves and their descendants long after the end of Reconstruction. “No sir,” Mary Gaffney, an elderly ex-slave, recalled in the 1930s, “we were not given a thing but freedom.” Toward a New South Out of the conflict on the plantations, new systems of labor emerged in the different regions of the South. The task system, under which workers were assigned daily tasks, completion of which ended their responsibilities for that day, survived in the rice kingdom of South Carolina and Georgia. Closely supervised wage labor predominated on the sugar plantations of southern Louisiana. Sharecropping came to dominate the Cotton Belt and much of the Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina. TH E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M ★ 573 Sharecropping initially arose as a compromise between blacks’ desire for land and planters’ demand for labor discipline. The system allowed each black family to rent a part of a plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year. Sharecropping guaranteed the planters a stable resident labor force. Former slaves preferred it to gang labor because it offered them the prospect of working without day-to-day white supervision. But as the years went on, sharecropping became more and more oppressive. Sharecroppers’ economic opportunities were severely limited by a world market in which the price of farm products suffered a prolonged decline. The White Farmer The plight of the small farmer was not confined to blacks in the postwar South. Wartime devastation set in motion a train of events that permanently altered the independent way of life of white yeomen, leading to what they considered a loss of freedom. Before the war, most small farmers had concentrated on raising food for their families and grew little cotton. With much of their property destroyed, many yeomen saw their economic condition worsened by successive crop failures after the war. To obtain supplies from merchants, farmers were forced to take up the growing of cotton and pledge a part of the crop as collateral (property the creditor can seize if a debt is not paid). This system became known as the crop lien. Since interest rates were extremely high and the price of cotton fell steadily, many farmers found themselves still in debt after marketing their portion of the crop at year’s end. They had no choice but to continue to plant cotton to obtain new loans. By the mid-1870s, white farmers, who cultivated only 10 percent of the South’s cotton crop in 1860, were growing 40 percent, and many who had owned their land had fallen into dependency as sharecroppers, who now rented land owned by others. Both black and white farmers found themselves caught in the sharecropping and crop-lien systems. A far higher percentage of black than white farmers in the South rented land rather than owned it. But every census from 1880 to 1940 counted more white than black sharecroppers. The workings of sharecropping and the c rop-lien system are illustrated by the case of Matt Brown, a Mississippi farmer who borrowed money each year from a local merchant. He began 1892 with a debt of $226 held over from the previous year. By 1893, although he produced cotton worth $171, Brown’s debt had increased to $402, because he had borrowed $33 for food, $29 for clothing, $173 for supplies, and $112 for other items. Brown never succeeded in getting out of debt. He died in 1905; the last entry under his name in the merchant’s account book is a coffin. The Urban South Even as the rural South stagnated economically, southern cities experienced remarkable growth after the Civil War. As railroads penetrated the interior, they 574 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTH, 1880 Percentage of farms sharecropped (by county) 35–80% 26–34% 20–25% 13–19% 0–12% VIRGINIA NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE ARKANSAS SOUTH CAROLINA MISSISSIPPI TEXAS ALABAMA GEORGIA Atlantic O ce a n LOUISIANA Gulf of Mexico 0 0 150 150 FLORIDA 200 miles 200 kilometers By 1880, sharecropping had become the dominant form of agricultural labor in large parts of the South. The system involved both white and black farmers. enabled merchants in market centers like Atlanta to trade directly with the North, bypassing coastal cities that had traditionally monopolized southern commerce. A new urban middle class of merchants, railroad promoters, and bankers reaped the benefits of the spread of cotton production in the postwar South. Thus, Reconstruction brought about profound changes in the lives of southerners, black and white, rich and poor. In place of the prewar world of master, slave, and self-sufficient yeoman, the postwar South was peopled by new social c lasses—landowning employers, black and white sharecroppers, cotton-producing white farmers, wage-earning black laborers, and urban entrepreneurs. Each of these groups turned to Reconstruction politics in an attempt to shape to its own advantage the aftermath of emancipation. Aftermath of Slavery The United States, of course, was not the only society to confront the problem of the transition from slavery to freedom. Indeed, many parallels exist between the debates during Reconstruction and struggles that followed slavery in other parts TH E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M ★ 575 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Petition of Committee in Behalf of the Freedmen to Andrew Johnson (1865) In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson ordered land that had been distributed to freed slaves in South Carolina and Georgia returned to its former owners. A committee of freedmen drafted a petition asking for the right to obtain land. Johnson did not, however, change his policy. We the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina, have learned from you through Major General O. O. Howard . . . with deep sorrow and painful hearts of the possibility of [the] government restoring these lands to the former owners. We are well aware of the many perplexing and trying questions that burden your mind, and therefore pray to god (the preserver of all, and who has through our late and beloved President [Lincoln’s] proclamation and the war made us a free people) that he may guide you in making your decisions and give you that wisdom that cometh from above to settle these great and important questions for the best interests of the country and the colored race. Here is where secession was born and nurtured. Here is where we have toiled nearly all our lives as slaves and treated like dumb driven cattle. This is our home, we have made these lands what they were, we are the only true and loyal people that were found in possession of these lands. We have been always ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be to preserve this glorious Union. Shall not we who are freedmen and have always been true to this Union have the same rights as are enjoyed by others? . . . Are not our rights as a free people and good citizens of these United States to be considered before those who were found in rebellion against this good and just government? . . . [Are] we who have been abused and oppressed for many long years not to be allowed the privilege of purchasing land but be subject to the will of these large land owners? God forbid. Land monopoly is injurious to the advancement of the course of freedom, and if government does not make some provision by which we as freedmen can obtain a homestead, we have not bettered our condition. . . . We look to you . . . f or protection and equal rights with the privilege of purchasing a h omestead—a homestead right here in the heart of South Carolina. From a Sharecropping Contract (1866) Few former slaves were able to acquire land in the post–Civil War South. Most ended up as sharecroppers, working on w hite-owned land for a share of the crop at the end of the growing season. This contract, typical of thousands of others, originated in Tennessee. The laborers signed with an X, as they were illiterate. Thomas J. Ross agrees to employ the Freedmen to plant and raise a crop on his Rosstown Plantation. . . . On the following Rules, Regulations and Remunerations. 576 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n The said Ross agrees to furnish the land to cultivate, and a sufficient number of mules & horses and feed them to make and house said crop and all necessary farming utensils to carry on the same and to give unto said Freedmen whose names appear below one half of all the cotton, corn and wheat that is raised on said place for the year 1866 after all the necessary expenses are deducted out that accrues on said crop. Outside of the Freedmen’s labor in harvesting, carrying to market and selling the same the said Freedmen . . . covenant and agrees to and with said Thomas J. Ross that for and in consideration of one half of the crop before mentioned that they will plant, cultivate, and raise under the management control and Superintendence of said Ross, in good faith, a cotton, corn and oat crop under his management for the year 1866. And we the said Freedmen agrees to furnish ourselves & families in provisions, clothing, medicine and medical bills and all, and every kind of other expenses that we may incur on said plantation for the year 1866 free of charge to said Ross. Should the said Ross furnish us any of the above supplies or any other kind of expenses, during said year, [we] are to settle and pay him out of the net proceeds of our part of the crop the retail price of the county at time of sale or any price we may agree upon—The said Ross shall keep a regular book account, against each and every one or the head of every family to be adjusted and settled at the end of the year. We furthermore bind ourselves to and with said Ross that we will do good work and labor ten hours a day on an average, winter and summer. . . . We further agree that we will lose all lost time, or pay at the rate of one dollar per day, rainy days excepted. In sickness and women lying in childbed are to lose the time and account for it to the other hands out of his or her part of the crop. . . . We furthermore bind ourselves that we will obey the orders of said Ross in all things in carrying out and managing said crop for said year and be docked for disobedience. All is responsible for all farming utensils that is on hand or may be placed in care of said Freedmen for the year QU E STIONS 1866 to said Ross and are also responsible to said Ross if we carelessly, mali1. Why do the black petitioners believe that ciously maltreat any of his stock for owning land is essential to the enjoyment of said year to said Ross for damages to freedom? be assessed out of our wages. 2. In what ways does the contract limit the Samuel (X) Johnson, Thomas (X) freedom of the laborers? Richard, Tinny (X) Fitch, Jessie (X) Simmons, Sophe (X) Pruden, Henry 3. What do these documents suggest about (X) Pruden, Frances (X) Pruden, Elijah competing definitions of black freedom in (X) Smith the aftermath of slavery? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 577 Chinese laborers at work on a Louisiana plantation during Reconstruction. of the Western Hemisphere over the same issues of land, control of labor, and political power. In every case, former planters (or, in Haiti, where the planter class had been destroyed, the government itself) tried to encourage or require former slaves to go back to work on plantations to grow the same crops as under slavery. Planters elsewhere held the same stereotypical views of black laborers as were voiced by their counterparts in the United S tates—former slaves were supposedly lazy, were lacking in ambition, and thought that freedom meant an absence of labor. For their part, former slaves throughout the hemisphere tried to carve out as much independence as possible, both in their daily lives and in their labor. They attempted to reconstruct family life by withdrawing women and children from field labor (in the West Indies, women turned to marketing their families’ crops to earn income). Wherever possible, former slaves acquired land of their own and devoted more time to growing food for their families than to growing crops for the international market. In many places, the plantations either fell to pieces, as in Haiti, or continued operating with a new labor force composed of indentured servants from India and China, as in Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana. Southern planters in the United States brought in a few Chinese laborers in an attempt to replace freedmen, but since the federal government opposed such efforts, the Chinese remained only a tiny proportion of the southern workforce. 578 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? But if struggles over land and labor united its postemancipation experience with that of other societies, in one respect the United States was unique. Only in the United States were former slaves, within two years of the end of slavery, granted the right to vote and, thus, given a major share of political power. Few anticipated this development when the Civil War ended. It came about as the result of one of the greatest political crises of American h istory—the battle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction. The struggle resulted in profound changes in the nature of citizenship, the structure of constitutional authority, and the meaning of American freedom. THE MAKING OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION Andrew Johnson To Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fell the task of overseeing the restoration of the Union. Born in poverty in North Carolina, as a youth Johnson worked as a tailor’s apprentice. After moving to Tennessee, he achieved success through politics. Beginning as an alderman (a town official), he rose to serve in the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, and for two terms as governor of Tennessee. Johnson identified himself as the champion of his state’s “honest yeomen” and a foe of large planters, whom he described as a “bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” A strong defender of the Union, he became the only senator from a seceding state to remain at his post in Washington, D.C., when the Civil War began in 1861. When northern forces occupied Tennessee, Abraham Lincoln named him military governor. In 1864, Republicans nominated him to run for vice president as a symbol of the party’s hope of extending its organization into the South. In personality and outlook, Johnson proved unsuited for the responsibilities he shouldered after Lincoln’s death. A lonely, stubborn man, he was intolerant of criticism and unable to compromise. He lacked Lincoln’s political skills and keen sense of public opinion. A fervent believer in states’ rights, Johnson insisted that since secession was illegal, the southern states had never actually left the Union or surrendered the right to govern their own affairs. Moreover, while Johnson had supported emancipation once Lincoln made it a goal of the war effort, he held deeply racist views. African-Americans, Johnson believed, had no role to play in Reconstruction. The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction A little over a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and with Congress out of session until December, Johnson in May 1865 outlined his plan for reuniting the nation. He issued a series of proclamations that began the period TH E M A KI N G O F RA DI CA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 579 of Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867). Johnson offered a pardon (which restored political and property rights, except for slaves) to nearly all white southerners who took an oath of allegiance to the Union. He excluded Confederate leaders and wealthy planters whose prewar property had been valued at more than $20,000. This exemption suggested at first that Johnson planned a more punitive Reconstruction than Lincoln had intended. Most of those exempted, however, soon received individual pardons from the president. Johnson also appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions, elected by whites alone, that would establish loyal governments in the South. Apart from the requirement that they abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and refuse to pay the Confederate d ebt—all unavoidable consequences of southern defeat—he granted the new governments a free hand in managing local affairs. At first, most northerners believed Johnson’s policy deserved a chance to succeed. The conduct of the southern governments elected under his program, however, turned most of the Republican North against the president. By and large, white voters returned prominent Confederates and members of the old elite to power. Reports of violence directed against former slaves and northern visitors in the South further alarmed Republicans. The Black Codes But what aroused the most opposition to Johnson’s Reconstruction policy were the Black Codes, laws passed by the new southern governments that attempted to regulate the lives of the former slaves. These laws granted blacks certain rights, such as legalized marriage, ownership of property, and limited access to the courts. But they denied them the rights to testify against whites, to serve on juries or in state militias, or to vote. And in response to planters’ demands that the freedpeople be required to work on the plantations, the Black Codes declared that those who failed to sign yearly labor contracts could be arrested and hired out to white landowners. Some states limited the occupations open to blacks and barred them from acquiring land, and others provided that judges could assign black children to work for their former owners without the consent of the parents. “We are not permitted to own the land whereon to build a schoolhouse or a church,” complained a black convention in Mississippi. “Where is justice? Where is freedom?” Clearly, the death of slavery did not automatically mean the birth of freedom. But the Black Codes so completely violated free labor principles that they called forth a vigorous response from the Republican North. Wars—especially civil wars—often generate hostility and bitterness. But few groups of rebels in history have been treated more leniently than the defeated Confederates. A handful of southern leaders were arrested but most were quickly released. 580 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? Only one was executed—Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville prison, where thousands of Union prisoners of war had died. Most of the Union army was swiftly demobilized. What motivated the North’s turn against Johnson’s policies was not a desire to “punish” the white South, but the inability of the South’s political leaders to accept the reality of emancipation. “We must see to it,” announced Republican senator William Stewart of Nevada, “that the man made free by the Constitution of the United States is a freeman indeed.” The Radical Republicans When Congress assembled in December 1865, Johnson announced that with loyal governments functioning in all the southern states, the nation had been reunited. In response, Radical Republicans, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with Johnson during the summer and fall, called for the dissolution of these governments and the establishment of new ones with “rebels” excluded from power and black men guaranteed the right to vote. Radicals tended to represent constituencies in New England and the “burned-over” districts of the rural North that had been home to religious revivalism, abolitionism, and other reform movements. Although they differed on many issues, Radicals shared the conviction that Union victory created a golden opportunity to institutionalize the principle of equal rights for all, regardless of race. The Radicals fully embraced the expanded powers of the federal government born during the Civil War. Traditions of federalism and states’ rights, they insisted, must not obstruct a sweeping national effort to protect the rights of all Americans. The most prominent Radicals in Congress were Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, and Thaddeus Stevens, a lawyer and iron manufacturer who represented Pennsylvania in the House of Representatives. Before the Civil War, both had been outspoken foes of slavery and defenders of black rights. Early in the Civil War, both had urged Lincoln to free and arm the slaves, and both in 1865 favored black suffrage in the South. “The same national authority,” declared Sumner, “that destroyed slavery must see that this other pretension [racial inequality] is not permitted to survive.” Thaddeus Stevens’s most cherished aim was to confiscate the land of disloyal planters and divide it among former slaves and northern migrants to the South. “The whole fabric of southern society,” he declared, “must be changed. Without this, this Government can never be, as it has never been, a true republic.” But his plan to make “small independent landholders” of the former slaves proved too radical even for many of his Radical colleagues. Congress, to be sure, had already offered free land to settlers in the West in the Homestead Act of 1862. But this land had been in the possession of the federal government, not private individuals (although originally, of course, it had belonged to Indians). Most congressmen believed too deeply in the sanctity of property rights to be TH E M A KI N G O F RA DI CA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 581 willing to take land from one group of owners and distribute it to others. Stevens’s proposal failed to pass. The Origins of Civil Rights With the South unrepresented, Republicans enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Congress. But the party was internally divided. Most Republicans were moderates, not Radicals. Moderates believed that Johnson’s plan was flawed, but they desired to work with the president to modify it. They feared that neither northern nor southern whites would accept black suffrage. Moderates and Radicals joined in refusing to seat the southerners recently elected to Congress, but moderates broke with the Radicals by leaving the Johnson governments in place. Early in 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois proposed two bills, reflecting the moderates’ belief that Johnson’s policy required modification. The first extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had originally been established for only one year. The second, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, was described by one congressman as “one of the most important bills ever presented to the House for its action.” It defined all persons born in the United States as citizens and spelled out rights they were to enjoy without regard to race. Equality before the law was central to the measure—no longer could states enact laws like the Black Codes discriminating between white and black citizens. So were free labor values. According to the law, no state could deprive any c itizen of the right to make contracts, bring lawsuits, or enjoy equal protection of one’s person and property. These, said Trumbull, were the “fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man.” The bill made no mention of the right to vote for blacks. In constitutional terms, the Civil Rights Bill represented the first attempt to give concrete meaning to the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery, to define in law the essence of freedom. To the surprise of Congress, Johnson vetoed both bills. Both, he said, would centralize power in the national government and deprive the states of the authority to regulate their own affairs. Moreover, he argued, blacks did not deserve the rights of citizenship. By acting to secure their rights, Congress was discriminating “against the white race.” The vetoes made a breach between the president and nearly the entire Republican Party inevitable. Congress failed by a single vote to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override the veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill (although later in 1866, it did extend the Bureau’s life to 1870). But in April 1866, the Civil Rights Bill became the first major law in American history to be passed over a presidential veto. 582 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? The Fourteenth Amendment Congress now proceeded to adopt its own plan of Reconstruction. In June, it approved and sent to the states for ratification the Fourteenth Amendment, which placed in the Constitution the principle of citizenship for all persons born in the United States, and which empowered the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. The amendment prohibited the states from abridging the “privileges or immunities” of citizens or denying any person of the “equal protection of the laws.” This broad language opened the door for future Congresses and the federal courts to breathe meaning into the guarantee of legal equality. Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical RepubIn a compromise between the rad- licans in the House of Representatives during ical and moderate positions on black Reconstruction. suffrage, the amendment did not grant blacks the right to vote. But it did provide that if a state denied the vote to any group of men, that state’s representation in Congress would be reduced. (This provision did not apply when states barred women from voting.) The abolition of slavery threatened to increase southern political power, since now all blacks, not merely three-fifths as in the case of slaves, would be counted in determining a state’s representation in Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment offered the leaders of the white South a c hoice—allow black men to vote and keep their state’s full representation in the House of Representatives, or limit the vote to whites and sacrifice part of their political power. The Fourteenth Amendment produced an intense division between the parties. Not a single Democrat in Congress voted in its favor, and only 4 of 175 Republicans were opposed. Radicals, to be sure, expressed their disappointment that the amendment did not guarantee black suffrage. (It was far from perfect, Stevens told the House, but he intended to vote for it, “because I live among men and not among angels.”) Nonetheless, by writing into the Constitution the principle that equality before the law regardless of race is a fundamental right of all American citizens, the amendment made the most important change in that document since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. TH E M A KI N G O F RA DI CA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 583 The Reconstruction Act The Fourteenth Amendment became the central issue of the political campaign of 1866. Johnson embarked on a speaking tour of the North, called by journalists the “swing around the circle,” to urge voters to elect members of Congress committed to his own Reconstruction program. Denouncing his critics, the president made wild accusations that the Radicals were plotting to assassinate him. His behavior further undermined public support for his policies, as did riots that broke out in Memphis and New Orleans, in which white policemen and citizens killed dozens of blacks. In the northern congressional elections that fall, Republicans opposed to Johnson’s policies won a sweeping victory. Nonetheless, at the president’s urging, every southern state but Tennessee refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The intransigence of Johnson and the bulk of the white South pushed moderate Republicans toward the Radicals. In March 1867, over Johnson’s veto, Congress adopted the Reconstruction Act, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and called for the creation of new state governments, with black men given the right to vote. Thus began the period of Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. A variety of motives combined to produce Radical Reconstruction— demands by former slaves for the right to vote, the Radicals’ commitment to the idea of equality, widespread disgust with Johnson’s policies, the desire to fortify the Republican Party in the South, and the determination to keep ex- Confederates from office. But the conflict between President Johnson and Congress did not end with the passage of the Reconstruction Act. Impeachment and the Election of Grant In March 1867, Congress adopted the Tenure of Office Act, barring the president from removing certain officeholders, including cabinet members, without the consent of the Senate. Johnson considered this an unconstitutional restriction on his authority. In February 1868, he removed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, an ally of the Radicals. The House of Representatives responded by approving articles of impeachment—that is, it presented charges against Johnson to the Senate, which had to decide whether to remove him from office. That spring, for the first time in American history, a president was placed on trial before the Senate for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” By this point, virtually all Republicans considered Johnson a failure as president. But some moderates disliked Benjamin F. Wade, a Radical who, as temporary president of the Senate, would become president if Johnson were removed. Others feared that conviction would damage the constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the executive. Johnson’s lawyers assured moderate 584 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? Republicans that, if acquitted, he would stop interfering with Reconstruction policy. The final tally was 35–19 to convict Johnson, one vote short of the two- thirds necessary to remove him. Seven Republicans had joined the Democrats in voting to acquit the president. A few days after the vote, Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s most prominent military hero, as their candidate for president. Grant’s Democratic opponent was Horatio Seymour, the former governor of New York. Reconstruction became the central issue of the bitterly fought 1868 campaign. Republicans identified their opponents with secession and treason, a tactic known as “waving the bloody shirt.” Democrats denounced Reconstruction as unconstitutional A Republican campaign poster from 1868 and condemned black suffrage as a vio- depicts Ulysses S. Grant and his running mate lation of America’s political traditions. Henry Wilson not as a celebrated general and U.S. senator but as ordinary workingmen, They appealed openly to racism. Sey- embodiments of the dignity of free labor. mour’s running mate, Francis P. Blair Jr., charged Republicans with placing the South under the rule of “a semi-barbarous race” who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.” The Fifteenth Amendment Grant won the election of 1868, although by a margin—300,000 of 6 million votes cast—that many Republicans found uncomfortably slim. The result led Congress to adopt the era’s third and final amendment to the Constitution. In February 1869, it approved the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote because of race. Bitterly opposed by the Democratic Party, it was ratified in 1870. Although the Fifteenth Amendment opened the door to suffrage restrictions not explicitly based on race—literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes—and did not extend the right to vote to women, it marked the culmination of four decades of abolitionist agitation. As late as 1868, even after Congress had enfranchised black men in the South, only eight northern states TH E M A KI N G O F RA DI CA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 585 allowed African-American men to vote. With the Fifteenth Amendment, the American A nti-Slavery Society disbanded, its work, its members believed, now complete. “Nothing in all history,” exclaimed veteran abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot-box.” The “Great Constitutional Revolution” The laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era—a newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law. What Republican leader Carl Schurz called the “great Constitutional revolution” of Reconstruction transformed the federal system and with it, the language of freedom so central to American political culture. Before the Civil War, American citizenship had been closely linked to race. The first Congress, in 1790, had limited to whites the right to become a naturalized citizen when immigrating from abroad. No black person, free or slave, the Supreme Court had declared in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, could be a citizen of the United States. The laws and amendments of Reconstruction repudiated the idea that citizenship was an entitlement of whites alone. The principle of equality before the law, moreover, did not apply only to the South. The Reconstruction amendments voided many northern laws discriminating on the basis of race. And, as one congressman noted, the amendments expanded the liberty of whites as well as blacks, including “the millions of people of foreign birth who will flock to our shores.” The new amendments also transformed the relationship between the federal government and the states. The Bill of Rights had linked civil liberties to the autonomy of the states. Its language—“Congress shall make no law”— reflected the belief that concentrated national power posed the greatest threat to freedom. The authors of the Reconstruction amendments assumed that rights required national power to enforce them. Rather than a threat to liberty, the federal government, in Charles Sumner’s words, had become “the custodian of freedom.” The Reconstruction amendments transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government. In the twentieth century, many of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions expanding the rights of American citizens were based on the Fourteenth Amendment, perhaps most notably the 1954 Brown ruling that outlawed school segregation (see Chapter 24). 586 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? Boundaries of Freedom Reconstruction redrew the boundaries of American freedom. Lines of exclusion that limited the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been central to the practice of American democracy. Only in an unparalleled crisis could they have been replaced, even temporarily, by the vision of a republic of equals embracing black Americans as well as white. That the United States was a “white man’s government” had been a widespread belief before the Civil War. It is not difficult to understand why Andrew Johnson, in one of his veto messages, claimed that federal protection of blacks’ civil rights violated “all our experience as a people.” Another illustration of the new spirit of racial inclusiveness was the Burlingame Treaty, negotiated by Anson Burlingame, an antislavery congressman from Massachusetts before being named American envoy to China. Other treaties with China had been o ne-sided, securing trading and political advantages for European powers. The Burlingame Treaty reaffirmed China’s national sovereignty, and provided reciprocal protection for religious freedom and against discrimination for citizens of each country emigrating or visiting the other. When Burlingame died, Mark Twain wrote a eulogy that praised him for “outgrow[ing] the narrow citizenship of a state [to] become a citizen of the world.” Reconstruction Republicans’ belief in universal rights had its limits. In his remarkable “Composite Nation” speech of 1869, Frederick Douglass condemned prejudice against immigrants from China. America’s destiny, he declared, was to transcend race by serving as an asylum for people “gathered here from all corners of the globe by a common aspiration for national liberty.” A year later, Charles Sumner moved to strike the word “white” from naturalization requirements. Senators from the western states objected. At their insistence, the naturalization law was amended to make Africans eligible to obtain citizenship when migrating from abroad. But Asians remained ineligible. The racial boundaries of nationality had been redrawn, but not eliminated. The juxtaposition of the amended naturalization law and the Fourteenth Amendment created a significant division in the A sian-American community. Well into the twentieth century, Asian immigrants could not become citizens, but their native-born children automatically did. The Rights of Women “The contest with the South that destroyed slavery,” wrote the Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher in his diary, “has caused an immense increase in the popular passion for liberty and equality.” But advocates of women’s rights encountered the limits of the Reconstruction commitment to equality. Women TH E M A KI N G O F RA DI CA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 587 activists saw Reconstruction as the moment to claim their own emancipation. No less than blacks, proclaimed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women had arrived at a “transition period, from slavery to freedom.” The rewriting of the Constitution, declared suffrage leader Olympia Brown, offered the opportunity to sever the blessings of freedom from sex as well as race and to “bury the black man and the woman in the citizen.” The destruction of slavery led feminists to search for ways to make the promise of free labor real for women. Every issue of the new women’s rights journal, The Agitator, edited by Mary Livermore, who had led f und-raising efforts for aid to Union soldiers during the war, carried stories complaining of the limited job opportunities and unequal pay for females who entered the labor market. Other feminists debated how to achieve “liberty for married women.” Demands for liberalizing divorce laws (which generally required evidence of adultery, desertion, or extreme abuse to terminate a marriage) and for recognizing “woman’s control over her own body” (including protection against domestic violence and access to what later generations would call birth control) moved to the center of many feminists’ concerns. “Our rotten marriage institution,” one Ohio woman wrote, “is the main obstacle in the way of woman’s freedom.” Feminists and Radicals In one place, women’s political rights did expand during Reconstruction—not, however, in a bastion of radicalism such as Massachusetts, but in the Wyoming territory. This had less to do with the era’s egalitarian impulse than with the desire to attract female emigrants to an area where men outnumbered women five to one. In 1869, Wyoming’s diminutive legislature (it consisted of fewer than twenty men) extended the right to vote to women, and the bill was then signed by the governor, a federal appointee. Wyoming entered the Union in 1890, becoming the first state since New Jersey in the late eighteenth century to allow women to vote. In general, however, talk of woman suffrage and redesigning marriage found few sympathetic male listeners. Even Radical Republicans insisted that Reconstruction was the “Negro’s hour” (the hour, that is, of the black male). The Fourteenth Amendment for the first time introduced the word “male” into the Constitution, in its clause penalizing a state for denying any group of men the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment outlawed discrimination in voting based on race but not gender. These measures produced a bitter split both between feminists and Radical Republicans, and within feminist circles. Some leaders, like Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did nothing to enfranchise women. They denounced their former abolitionist allies and moved to sever the women’s rights movement from its earlier moorings in the antislavery tradition. On occasion, they appealed 588 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? A Delegation of Advocates of Woman Suffrage Addressing the House Judiciary Committee, an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 4, 1871. The group includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated just to the right of the speaker, and Susan B. Anthony, at the table on the extreme right. to racial and ethnic prejudices, arguing that n ative-born white women deserved the vote more than non-whites and immigrants. “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic,” declared Stanton, had no right to be “making laws for [feminist leader] Lucretia Mott.” But other a bolitionist-feminists, like Abby Kelley and Lucy Stone, insisted that despite their limitations, the Reconstruction amendments represented steps in the direction of truly universal suffrage and should be supported. The result was a split in the movement and the creation in 1869 of two hostile women’s rights organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, with Lucy Stone as president. They would not reunite until 1890. Thus, even as it rejected the racial definition of freedom that had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reconstruction left the gender boundary largely intact. When women tried to use the rewritten legal code and Constitution to claim equal rights, they found the courts unreceptive. Myra Bradwell invoked the idea of free labor in challenging an Illinois statute limiting the practice of law to men, but the Supreme Court in 1873 rebuffed her claim. Free labor principles, the justices declared, did not apply to women, since “the law of the Creator” had assigned them to “the domestic sphere.” TH E M A KI N G O F RA DI CA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 589 Despite their limitations, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 marked a radical departure in American history. “We have cut loose from the whole dead past,” wrote Timothy Howe, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, “and have cast our anchor out a hundred years” into the future. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 inaugurated America’s first real experiment in interracial democracy. RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH “The Tocsin of Freedom” Among the former slaves, the passage of the Reconstruction Act inspired an outburst of political organization. At mass political m eetings—community gatherings attended by men, women, and children—African-Americans staked their claim to equal citizenship. Blacks, declared an Alabama meeting, deserved “exactly the same rights, privileges and immunities as are enjoyed by white men. We ask for nothing more and will be content with nothing less.” These gatherings inspired direct action to remedy long-standing grievances. Hundreds took part in sit-ins that integrated horse-drawn public streetcars in cities across the South. Plantation workers organized strikes for higher wages. Speakers, male and female, fanned out across the South. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a black veteran of the abolitionist movement, embarked on a two-year tour, lecturing on “Literacy, Land, and Liberation.” James D. Lynch, a member of the group that met with General Sherman in 1865, organized Republican meetings. He became known, in the words of a white contemporary, as “a great orator, fluid and graceful,” who “stirred the emotions” of his listeners “as no other man could do.” Determined to exercise their new rights as citizens, thousands joined the Union League, an organization closely linked to the Republican Party, and the vast majority of eligible African-Americans registered to vote. James K. Green, a former slave in Hale County, Alabama, and a League organizer, went on to serve eight years in the Alabama legislature. In the 1880s, Green looked back on his political career. Before the war, he declared, “I was entirely ignorant; I knew nothing more than to obey my master; and there were thousands of us in the same attitude. . . . But the tocsin [warning bell] of freedom sounded and knocked at the door and we walked out like free men and shouldered the responsibilities.” By 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and in a region where the Republican Party had not existed before the war, nearly all were under Republican control. Their new state constitutions, drafted in 1868 and 1869 by the first public bodies in American history with substantial black representation, marked a considerable improvement over 590 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the South? those they replaced. The constitutions greatly expanded public responsibilities. They established the region’s first state- funded systems of free public education, and they created new penitentiaries, orphan asylums, and homes for the insane. The constitutions guaranteed equality of civil and political rights and abolished practices of the antebellum era such as whipping as a punishment for crime, property qualifications for officeholding, and imprisonment for debt. A few states initially barred former Confederates from voting, but this policy was quickly abandoned by the new state governments. The Black Officeholder From the Plantation to the Senate, an 1883 lithograph celebrating African-American progress during Reconstruction. Among the black leaders pictured at the top are Reconstruction congressmen Benjamin S. Turner, Josiah T. Walls, and Joseph H. Rainey; Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first African-American senator; religious leader Richard Allen; and abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. At the center emancipated slaves work in the cotton fields, and below children attend school and a black family stands outside its home. Throughout Reconstruction, black voters provided the bulk of the Republican Party’s support. But African-Americans did not control Reconstruction politics, as their opponents frequently charged. The highest offices remained almost entirely in white hands, and only in South Carolina, where blacks made up 60 percent of the population, did they form a majority of the legislature. Nonetheless, the fact that some 2,000 African-Americans occupied public offices during Reconstruction represented a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government. African-Americans were represented at every level of government. Fourteen were elected to the national House of Representatives. Two blacks served in the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction, both representing Mississippi. Hiram Revels, who had been born free in North Carolina, was educated in Illinois, and served as a chaplain in the wartime Union army, in 1870 became the first black senator in American history. The second, Blanche K. Bruce, a former slave, was elected in 1875. The next African-American elected to the Senate was Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, who served 1967–1978. RA DI CA L RECO N STRUC T I O N I N T H E S O U T H ★ 591 Pinckney B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana, the G eorgia- born son of a white planter and a free black woman, served briefly during the winter of 1872–1873 as America’s first black governor. More than a century would pass before L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, elected in 1989, became the second. Some 700 blacks sat in state legislatures during Reconstruction, and scores held local offices ranging from justice of the peace to sheriff, tax assessor, and policeman. The presence of black officeholders and their white allies made a real difference in southern life, ensuring that blacks accused of crimes would be tried before juries of their peers and enforcing fairness in such aspects of local government as road repair, tax assessment, and poor relief. In South Carolina and Louisiana, homes of the South’s wealthiest and best-educated free black communities, most prominent Reconstruction officeholders had never experienced slavery. In addition, a number of black Reconstruction officials, like Pennsylvania-born Jonathan J. Wright, who served on the South Carolina Supreme Court, had come from the North after the Civil War. The majority, however, were former slaves who had established their leadership in the black community by serving in the Union army, working as ministers, teachers, or skilled craftsmen, or engaging in Union League organizing. Among the most celebrated black officeholders was Robert Smalls, who had worked as a slave on the Charleston docks before the Civil War and who won national fame in 1862 by secretly guiding the Planter, a Confederate vessel, out of the harbor and delivering it to Union forces. Smalls became a powerful political leader on the South Carolina Sea Islands and was elected to five terms in Congress. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags The new southern governments also brought to power new groups of whites. Many Reconstruction officials were northerners who for one reason or another had made their homes in the South after the war. Their opponents dubbed them carpetbaggers, implying that they had packed all their belongings in a suitcase and left their homes in order to reap the spoils of office in the South. Some carpetbaggers were undoubtedly corrupt adventurers. The large majority, h owever, were former Union soldiers who decided to remain in the South when the war ended, before there was any prospect of going into politics. Others were investors in land and railroads who saw in the postwar South an opportunity to combine personal economic advancement with a role in helping to substitute, as one wrote, “the civilization of freedom for that of slavery.” Teachers, Freedmen’s Bureau officers, and others who came to the region genuinely hoping to assist the former slaves represented another large group of carpetbaggers. 592 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the South? Most white Republicans had been born in the South. Former Confederates reserved their greatest scorn for these scalawags, whom they considered traitors to their race and region. Some southern-born Republicans were men of stature and wealth, like James L. Alcorn, the owner of one of Mississippi’s largest plantations and the state’s first Republican governor. Most scalawags, however, were non-slaveholding white farmers from the southern upcountry. Many had been wartime Unionists, and they now cooperated with the Republicans in order to prevent “rebels” from returning to power. Others hoped Reconstruction governments would help them recover from wartime economic losses by suspending the collection of debts and enacting laws protecting small property holders from losing their homes to creditors. In states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, Republicans initially commanded a significant minority of the white vote. Even in the Deep South, the small white Republican vote was important, because the population remained almost evenly divided between blacks (almost all of whom voted for the party of Lincoln) and whites (overwhelmingly Democratic). Southern Republicans in Power In view of the daunting challenges they faced, the remarkable thing is not that Reconstruction governments in many respects failed, but how much they did accomplish. Perhaps their greatest achievement lay in establishing the South’s first s tate-supported public schools. The new educational systems served both black and white children, although generally in schools segregated by race. Only in New Orleans were the public schools integrated during Reconstruction, and only in South Carolina did the state university admit black students (elsewhere, separate colleges were established). By the 1870s, in a region whose prewar leaders had made it illegal for slaves to learn and had done little to provide education for poorer whites, more than half the children, black and white, were attending public schools. The new governments also pioneered civil rights legislation. Their laws made it illegal for railroads, hotels, and other institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Enforcement varied considerably from locality to locality, but Reconstruction established for the first time at the state level a standard of equal citizenship and a recognition of blacks’ right to a share of public services. Republican governments also took steps to strengthen the position of rural laborers and promote the South’s economic recovery. They passed laws to ensure that agricultural laborers and sharecroppers had the first claim on harvested crops, rather than merchants to whom the landowner owed money. South Carolina created a state Land Commission, which by 1876 had settled 14,000 black families and a few poor whites on their own farms. RA DI CA L RECO N STRUC T I O N I N T H E S O U T H ★ 593 The Quest for Prosperity Rather than land distribution, however, the Reconstruction governments pinned their hopes for southern economic growth and opportunity for African- Americans and poor whites alike on regional economic development. Railroad construction, they believed, was the key to transforming the South into a society of booming factories, bustling towns, and diversified agriculture. “A free and living republic,” declared a Tennessee Republican, would “spring up in the track of the railroad.” Every state during Reconstruction helped to finance railroad construction, and through tax reductions and other incentives tried to attract northern manufacturers to invest in the region. The program had mixed results. Economic development in general remained weak. With abundant opportunities existing in the West, few northern investors ventured to the Reconstruction South. To their supporters, the governments of Radical Reconstruction presented a complex pattern of disappointment and accomplishment. A revitalized southern economy failed to materialize, and most African-Americans remained locked in poverty. On the other hand, biracial democratic government, a thing unknown in American history, for the first time functioned effectively in many parts of the South. Public facilities were rebuilt and expanded, school systems established, and legal codes purged of racism. The conservative elite that had dominated southern government from colonial times to 1867 found itself excluded from political power, while poor whites, newcomers from the North, and former slaves cast ballots, sat on juries, and enacted and administered laws. “We have gone through one of the most remarkable changes in our relations to each other,” declared a white South Carolina lawyer in 1871, “that has been known, perhaps, in the history of the world.” It is a measure of how far change had progressed that the reaction against Reconstruction proved so extreme. THE OVERTHROW OF RECONSTRUCTION Reconstruction’s Opponents The South’s traditional leaders— planters, merchants, and Democratic politicians—bitterly opposed the new governments. They denounced them as corrupt, inefficient, and examples of “black supremacy.” “Intelligence, virtue, and patriotism” in public life, declared a protest by prominent southern Democrats, had given way to “ignorance, stupidity, and vice.” Corruption did exist during Reconstruction, but it was confined to no race, region, or party. The rapid growth of state budgets and the benefits to be gained from public aid led 594 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the abandonment of Reconstruction? in some states to a scramble for influence that produced bribery, insider dealing, and a get-rich-quick atmosphere. Southern frauds, however, were dwarfed by those practiced in these years by the Whiskey Ring, which involved high officials of the Grant administration, and by New York’s Tweed Ring, controlled by the Democrats, whose thefts ran into the tens of millions of dollars. (These are discussed in the next chapter.) The rising taxes needed to pay for schools and other new public facilities and to assist railroad development were another cause of opposition to Reconstruction. Many poor whites who had initially supported the Republican Party turned against it when it became clear that their economic situation was not improving. The most basic reason for opposition to Reconstruction, however, was that most white southerners could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law. In order to restore white supremacy in southern public life and to ensure planters a disciplined, reliable labor force, they believed, Reconstruction must be overthrown. Opponents launched a campaign of violence in an effort to end Republican rule. Their actions posed a fundamental challenge both for Reconstruction governments in the South and for policymakers in Washington, D.C. “A Reign of Terror” The Civil War ended in 1865, but violence remained widespread in large parts of the postwar South. In the early years of Reconstruction, violence was mostly local and unorganized. Blacks were assaulted and murdered for refusing to give way to whites on city sidewalks, using “insolent” language, challenging end- of-year contract settlements, and attempting to buy land. The violence that greeted the advent of Republican governments after 1867, however, was far more pervasive and more directly motivated by politics. In wide areas of the South, secret societies sprang up with the aim of preventing blacks from voting and destroying the organization of the Republican Party by assassinating local leaders and public officials. The most notorious such organization was the Ku Klux Klan, which in effect served as a military arm of the Democratic Party in the South. From its founding in 1866 in Tennessee, the Klan was a terrorist organization. It quickly spread into nearly every southern state. Led by planters, merchants, and Democratic politicians, men who liked to style themselves the South’s “respectable citizens,” the Klan committed some of the most brutal criminal acts in American history. In many counties, it launched what one victim called a “reign of terror” against Republican leaders, black and white. The Klan’s victims included white Republicans, among them wartime Unionists and local officeholders, teachers, and party organizers. William Luke, TH E O VERTH RO W OF R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 595 an I rish-born teacher in a black school, was lynched in 1870. But African- Americans—local political leaders, those who managed to acquire land, and others who in one way or another defied the norms of white s upremacy— bore the brunt of the violence. In York County, South Carolina, where nearly the entire white male population joined the Klan (and women participated by sewing the robes and hoods Klansmen wore as disguises), the organization committed eleven murders and hundreds of whippings. On occasion, violence escalated from assaults on individuals to mass terrorism and even local insurrections. In Meridian, Mississippi, in 1871, some thirty blacks were murdered in cold blood, along with a white Republican judge. The bloodiest act of violence A Tennessee member of the Ku Klux Klan, phoduring Reconstruction took place in tographed in his hooded disguise around 1870. Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, where armed whites assaulted the town with a small cannon. Hundreds of former slaves were murdered, including fifty members of a black militia unit after they had surrendered. Unable to suppress the Klan, the new southern governments appealed to Washington for help. In 1870 and 1871, Congress adopted three Enforcement Acts, outlawing terrorist societies and allowing the president to use the army against them. These laws continued the expansion of national authority during Reconstruction. They defined crimes that aimed to deprive citizens of their civil and political rights as federal offenses rather than violations of state law. In 1871, President Grant dispatched federal marshals, backed up by troops in some areas, to arrest hundreds of accused Klansmen. Many Klan leaders fled the South. After a series of w ell-publicized trials, the Klan went out of existence. In 1872, for the first time since before the Civil War, peace reigned in most of the former Confederacy. The Liberal Republicans Despite the Grant administration’s effective response to Klan terrorism, the North’s commitment to Reconstruction waned during the 1870s. Many Radicals, 596 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the abandonment of Reconstruction? including Thaddeus Stevens, who died in 1868, had passed from the scene. Within the Republican Party, their place was taken by politicians less committed to the ideal of equal rights for blacks. Northerners increasingly felt that the South should be able to solve its own problems without constant interference from Washington. The federal government had freed the slaves, made them citizens, and given them the right to vote. Now, blacks should rely on their own resources, not demand further assistance. In 1872, an influential group of Republicans, alienated by corruption within the Grant administration and believing that the growth of federal power during and after the war needed to be curtailed, formed their own party. They included Republican founders like Lyman Trumbull and prominent editors and journalists such as E. L. Godkin of The Nation. Calling themselves Liberal Republicans, they nominated Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, for president. The Liberals’ alienation from the Grant administration initially had little to do with Reconstruction. They claimed that corrupt politicians had come to power in the North by manipulating the votes of immigrants and workingmen, while men of talent and education like themselves had been pushed aside. Democratic criticisms of Reconstruction, however, found a receptive audience among the Liberals. As in the North, they became convinced, the “best men” of the South had been excluded from power while “ignorant” voters controlled politics, producing corruption and misgovernment. Power in the South should be returned to the region’s “natural leaders.” During the campaign of 1872, Greeley repeatedly called on Americans to “clasp hands across the bloody chasm” by putting the Civil War and Reconstruction behind them. Greeley had spent most of his career, first as a Whig and then as a Republican, denouncing the Democratic Party. But with the Republican split presenting an opportunity to repair their political fortunes, Democratic leaders endorsed Greeley as their candidate. Many rank-and-file Democrats, unable to bring themselves to vote for Greeley, stayed at home on election day. As a result, Greeley suffered a devastating defeat by Grant, whose margin of more than 700,000 popular votes was the largest in a n ineteenth-century presidential contest. But Greeley’s campaign placed on the northern agenda the one issue on which the Liberal reformers and the Democrats could agree—a new policy toward the South. The North’s Retreat The Liberal attack on Reconstruction, which continued after 1872, contributed to a resurgence of racism in the North. Journalist James S. Pike, a leading Greeley supporter, in 1874 published The Prostrate State, an influential account of a visit to South Carolina. The book depicted a state engulfed by political corruption, drained by governmental extravagance, and under the control of “a mass TH E O VERTH RO W OF R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 597 of black barbarism.” The South’s problems, Pike insisted, arose from “Negro government.” The solution was to restore leading whites to political power. Newspapers that had long supported Reconstruction now began to condemn black participation in southern government. They expressed their views visually as well. Engravings depicting the former slaves as heroic Civil War veterans, upstanding citizens, or victims of violence were increasingly replaced by caricatures presenting them as little more than unbridled animals. Resurgent racism offered a convenient explanation for the alleged “failure” of Reconstruction. Other factors also weakened northern support for Reconstruction. In 1873, the country plunged into a severe economic depression. Distracted by economic problems, Republicans were in no mood to devote further attention to the South. The depression dealt the South a severe blow and further weakened the prospect that Republicans could revitalize the region’s economy. Democrats made substantial gains throughout the nation in the elections of 1874. For the first time since the Civil War, their party took control of the House of Representatives. Before the new Congress met, the old one enacted a final piece of Reconstruction legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation like hotels and theaters. But it was clear that the northern public was retreating from Reconstruction. The Supreme Court whittled away at the guarantees of black rights Congress had adopted. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), white butchers excluded from a s tate-sponsored monopoly in Louisiana went to court, claiming that their right to equality before the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. The justices rejected their claim, ruling that the amendment had not altered traditional federalism. Most of the rights of citizens, it declared, remained under state control. Three years later, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Court gutted the Enforcement Acts by throwing out the convictions of some of those responsible for the Colfax Massacre of 1873. The Triumph of the Redeemers By the m id-1870s, Reconstruction was clearly on the defensive. Democrats had already regained control of states with substantial white voting majorities such as Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas. The victorious Democrats called themselves Redeemers, since they claimed to have “redeemed” the white South from corruption, misgovernment, and northern and black control. In those states where Reconstruction governments survived, violence again erupted. This time, the Grant administration showed no desire to intervene. In contrast to the Klan’s activities—conducted at night by disguised men— the violence of 1875 and 1876 took place in broad daylight, as if to underscore Democrats’ conviction that they had nothing to fear from Washington. In 598 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the abandonment of Reconstruction? RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH, 1867–1877 PENNSYLVANIA COLORADO ILLINOIS INDIANA OHIO WEST VIRGINIA KANSAS MISSOURI KENTUCKY NEW MEXICO TERRITORY INDIAN TERRITORY VIRGINIA 1870 (1873) NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE 1868 (1876) 1866 (1870) ARKANSAS MARYLAND DELAWARE SOUTH CAROLINA 1868 (1874) MISSISSIPPI ALABAMA 1870 (1875) 1868 (1874) GEORGIA 1868 (1876) 1870 (1871) TEXAS 1870 (1873) Atlantic Ocean LOUISIANA 1868 (1876) FLORIDA Gulf of Mexico Former Confederate states 1869 Date of readmission to the Union (1873) Date of election that produced Democratic control of legislature and governorship 0 0 150 150 1868 (1876) 300 miles 300 kilometers Mississippi, in 1875, white rifle clubs drilled in public and openly assaulted and murdered Republicans. When Governor Adelbert Ames, a Maine-born Union general, frantically appealed to the federal government for assistance, President Grant responded that the northern public was “tired out” by southern problems. On election day, armed Democrats destroyed ballot boxes and drove former slaves from the polls. The result was a Democratic landslide and the end of Reconstruction in Mississippi. “A revolution has taken place,” wrote Ames, “and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to . . . an era of second slavery.” Similar events took place in South Carolina in 1876. Democrats nominated for governor former Confederate general Wade Hampton. Hampton promised to respect the rights of all citizens of the state, but his supporters, inspired by Democratic tactics in Mississippi, launched a wave of intimidation. Democrats intended to carry the election, one planter told a black official, “if we have to wade in blood knee-deep.” The Disputed Election and Bargain of 1877 Events in South Carolina directly affected the outcome of the presidential campaign of 1876. To succeed Grant, the Republicans nominated Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. Democrats chose as his opponent New York’s TH E O VERTH RO W OF R E C O N S T R U C T I O N ★ 599 governor, Samuel J. Tilden. By this time, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana remained under Republican control. The election turned out to be 55 7 so close that whoever captured these 2 1 5 13 10 35 11 4 states—which both parties claimed to 6 29 11 3 9 3 21 15 22 3 have carried—would become the next 5 3 11 8 6 5 15 12 president. 10 12 7 6 Unable to resolve the impasse on 8 10 11 8 8 its own, Congress in January 1877 4 appointed a fifteen-member Electoral Non-voting territory Commission, composed of senators, Electoral Vote Popular Vote Party Candidate (Share) (Share) representatives, and Supreme Court Republican Hayes 185 (50%) 4,036,298 (48%) Democrat Tilden 184 (50%) 4,300,590 (51%) justices. Republicans enjoyed an 8–7 Greenback Cooper 0 (0%) 93,895 (1%) Disputed (assigned to Hayes by electoral commission) majority on the commission, and to no one’s surprise, the members decided by that margin that Hayes had carried the disputed southern states and had been elected president. Even as the commission deliberated, however, behind-the- scenes negotiations took place between leaders of the two parties. Hayes’s representatives agreed to recognize Democratic control of the entire South and to avoid further intervention in local affairs. They also pledged that Hayes would place a southerner in the cabinet position of postmaster general and that he would work for federal aid to the Texas and Pacific railroad, a transcontinental line projected to follow a southern route. For their part, Democrats promised not to dispute Hayes’s right to office and to respect the civil and political rights of blacks. Thus was concluded the Bargain of 1877. Not all of its parts were fulfilled. But Hayes became president, and he did appoint David M. Key of Tennessee as postmaster general. Hayes quickly ordered federal troops to stop guarding the state houses in Louisiana and South Carolina, allowing Democratic claimants to become governor. (Contrary to legend, Hayes did not remove the last soldiers from the S outh—he simply ordered them to return to their barracks.) But the Texas and Pacific never did get its land grant. Of far more significance, the triumphant southern Democrats failed to live up to their pledge to recognize blacks as equal citizens. THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1876 The End of Reconstruction As a historical p rocess—the nation’s adjustment to the destruction of s lavery— Reconstruction continued well after 1877. Blacks continued to vote and, in some states, hold office into the 1890s. But as a distinct era of national history—when 600 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the abandonment of Reconstruction? Republicans controlled much of the South, blacks exercised significant political power, and the federal government accepted the responsibility for protecting the fundamental rights of all American citizens—Reconstruction had come to an end. Despite its limitations, Reconstruction was a remarkable chapter in the story of American freedom. Nearly a century would pass before the nation again tried to bring equal rights to the descendants of slaves. The civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s would sometimes be called the Second Reconstruction. Even while it lasted, however, Reconstruction revealed some of the tensions inherent in n ineteenth-century discussions of freedom. The policy of granting black men the vote while denying them the benefits of land ownership strengthened the idea that the free citizen could be a poor, dependent laborer. Reconstruction placed on the national agenda a problem that would dominate political discussion for the next half-century—how, in a modern society, to define the economic essence of freedom. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1.In 1865, former Confederate general Robert Richardson remarked that “the emancipated slaves own nothing, because nothing but freedom has been given to them.” Explain whether this would be an accurate assessment of Reconstruction twelve years later. 2.The women’s movement split into two separate national organizations in part because the Fifteenth Amendment did not give women the vote. Explain why the two groups split. 3.How did black families, churches, schools, and other institutions contribute to the development of African-American culture and political activism in this period? 4.Why did ownership of land and control of labor become major points of contention between former slaves and whites in the South? 5.By what methods did southern whites seek to limit A frican-American civil rights and liberties? How did the federal government respond? 6.How did the failure of land reform and continued poverty lead to new forms of servitude for both blacks and whites? 7.What caused the confrontation between President Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction policies? 8.What national issues and attitudes combined to bring an end to Reconstruction by 1877? 9.By 1877, how did the condition of former slaves in the United States compare with that of freedpeople around the globe? C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 601 KEY TERMS the Freedmen’s Bureau (p. 571) Fifteenth Amendment (p. 585) sharecropping (p. 574) carpetbaggers (p. 592) crop lien (p. 574) scalawags (p. 593) Black Codes (p. 580) Ku Klux Klan (p. 595) Civil Rights Bill of 1866 (p. 582) Enforcement Acts (p. 596) Fourteenth Amendment (p. 583) Civil Rights Act of 1875 (p. 598) Reconstruction Act (p. 584) Redeemers (p. 598) Tenure of Office Act (p. 584) Bargain of 1877 (p. 600) impeachment (p. 584) Go to Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. 602 ★ CHAPTER 15 “W hat I s Fr eedom ? ”: Re c o n s t r u c t i o n ★ CHAPTER 16 ★ A M E R I C A’ S G I L D E D A G E 1 8 7 0–1 8 9 0 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial society after the Civil War? • How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? • Was the Gilded Age political system effective in meeting its goals? • How did the economic development of the Gilded Age affect American freedom? • How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? A n immense crowd gathered in New York harbor on October 28, 1886, for the dedication of Liberty Enlightening the World, a fitting symbol for a nation now wholly free. The idea for the statue originated in 1865 with Édouard de Laboulaye, a French educator and the author of several books on the United States, as a response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The statue, de Laboulaye hoped, would celebrate both the historic friendship between France and the United States and the triumph, through the Union’s victory in the Civil War, of American freedom. Measuring more than 150 feet from torch to toe and standing atop a huge pedestal, the edifice was the tallest m an-made structure in the Western Hemisphere. It exceeded ★ 603 • CHRONOLOGY • 1872 Crédit Mobilier scandal 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s Gilded Age 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn 1877 Reconstruction ends Munn v. Illinois Great Railroad Strike 1879 Henry George’s Progress and Poverty 1883 Civil Service Act Railroads create time zones William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other 1884 Elk v. Wilkins 1886 Haymarket affair Wabash v. Illinois Standard national railroad gauge 1887 Interstate Commerce Commission created Dawes Act 1888 Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives Massacre at Wounded Knee 1894 Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth 1895 United States v. E. C. Knight Co. in height, newspapers noted with pride, the Colossus of Rhodes, a wonder of the ancient world. In time, the Statue of Liberty, as it came to be called, would become Americans’ most revered national icon. For over a century it has stood as a symbol of freedom. The statue has offered welcome to millions of i mmigrants— the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” celebrated in a poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on its base in 1903. In the years since its dedication, the statue’s familiar image has been reproduced by folk artists in every conceivable medium and has been used by advertisers to promote everything from cigarettes and lawn mowers to war bonds. As its use by Chinese students demanding democracy in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 showed, it has become a powerful international symbol as well. The year of the statue’s dedication, 1886, also witnessed the “great upheaval,” a wave of strikes and labor protests that touched every part of the nation. The 600 dignitaries (598 of them men) who gathered on what is now called Liberty Island for the dedication hoped the Statue of Liberty would inspire renewed devotion to the nation’s political and economic system. But for all its grandeur, the statue could not conceal the deep social divisions and fears about the future of American freedom that accompanied the country’s emergence as the world’s leading industrial power. Nor did the celebrations address the crucial questions that moved to the center stage of American public life during the 1870s and 1880s and remained there for decades to come: What are the social conditions that make freedom possible, and what role should the national government play in defining and protecting the liberty of its citizens? 604 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial society after the Civil War? THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1896 Utah gains statehood 1899 Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class Between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century, the United States under1905 Lochner v. New York went one of the most rapid and profound • • economic revolutions any country has ever experienced. There were numerous causes for this explosive economic growth. The country enjoyed abundant natural resources, a growing supply of labor, an expanding market for manufactured goods, and the availability of capital for investment. In addition, the federal government actively promoted industrial and agricultural development. It enacted high tariffs that protected American industry from foreign competition, granted land to railroad companies to encourage construction, and used the army to remove Indians from western lands desired by farmers and mining companies. The Industrial Economy The rapid expansion of factory production, mining, and railroad construction in all parts of the country except the South signaled the transition from Lincoln’s America—a world centered on the small farm and artisan w orkshop—to a mature industrial society. Americans of the late nineteenth century marveled at the triumph of the new economy. “One can hardly believe,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, “there has been a revolution in history so rapid, so extensive, so complete.” By 1913, the United States produced o ne-third of the world’s industrial output—more than the total of Great Britain, France, and Germany combined. Half of all industrial workers now labored in plants with more than 250 employees. On the eve of the Civil War, the first industrial revolution, centered on the textile industry, had transformed New England into a center of manufacturing. But otherwise, the United States was still primarily an agricultural nation. By 1880, for the first time, the Census Bureau found a majority of the workforce engaged in non-farming jobs. The traditional dream of economic independence seemed obsolete. By 1890, t wo-thirds of Americans worked for wages, rather than owning a farm, business, or craft shop. Drawn to factories by the promise of employment, a new working class emerged in these years. Between 1870 and 1920, almost 11 million Americans moved from farm to city, and another 25 million immigrants arrived from overseas. Most manufacturing now took place in industrial cities. New York, with its new skyscrapers and hundreds of thousands of workers in all sorts of TH E SECO N D I N DUS T R I A L R E V O L U T I O N ★ 605 Table 16.1 Indicators of Economic Change, 1870–1920 1870 1900 1920 Farms (millions) Land in farms (million acres) Wheat grown (million bushels) 2.7 408 254 5.7 841 599 6.4 956 843 Employment (millions) In manufacturing (millions) 14 2.5 28.5 5.9 44.5 11.2 Percentage in workforcea Agricultural Industryb Trade, service, administrationc 52 29 20 38 31 31 27 44 27 53 Railroad track (thousands of miles) Steel produced (thousands of tons) 0.8 258 11.2 407 46 GNP (billions of dollars) Per capita (in 1920 dollars) 7.4 371 18.7 707 91.5 920 42 47 54 Life expectancy at birth (years) Percentages are rounded and do not total 100. Includes manufacturing, transportation, mining, and construction. c Includes trade, finance, and public administration. a b manufacturing establishments, symbolized dynamic urban growth. After merging with Brooklyn in 1898, its population exceeded 3.4 million. The city financed industrialization and westward expansion, its banks and stock exchange funneling capital to railroads, mines, and factories. But the heartland of the second industrial revolution was the region around the Great Lakes, with its factories producing iron and steel, machinery, chemicals, and packaged foods. Pittsburgh had become the world’s center of iron and steel manufacturing. Chicago, by 1900 the nation’s s econd-largest city, with 1.7 million inhabitants, was home to factories producing steel and farm machinery and giant stockyards where cattle were processed into meat products for shipment east in refrigerated rail cars. Smaller industrial cities also proliferated, often concentrating on a single industry— cast-iron stoves in Troy, New York, furniture in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Railroads and the National Market The railroad made possible what is sometimes called the “second industrial revolution.” Spurred by private investment and massive grants of land and money by federal, state, and local governments, the number of miles of railroad track in the United States tripled between 1860 and 1880 and tripled again 606 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial society after the Civil War? THE RAILROAD NETWORK, 1880 Seattle Pacific Time Zone Mountain Time Zone Central Time Zone Portland Eastern Time Zone CANADA Northern Pacif ic Helena Boise cific ntral Pa Reno Ce St. Paul Union Pac ific Denver Los Angeles Phoenix Omaha Kansas City St. Louis Memphis Santa Fe El Paso Chicago Illinois Central San Francisco k Ce Boston ntra l New York Cleveland Penn s Pittsburgh ylvania Philadelphia Washington, D.C. Baltimore and Ohio Norfolk Atlanta Charleston Dallas Sou ther nP acific Houston Pa c ific Ocean New Y or Buffalo Detroit Salt Lake City Atlantic Time Zone A tl anti c O cean Mobile New Orleans MEXICO Gulf of Mexico 0 0 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers Major railroads in 1880 Time-zone boundaries By 1880, the transnational rail network made possible the creation of a truly national market for goods. by 1920, opening vast new areas to commercial farming and creating a truly national market for manufactured goods. In 1886, the railroads adopted a standard national gauge (the distance separating the two rails), making it possible for the first time for trains of one company to travel on any other company’s track. By the 1890s, five transcontinental lines transported the products of western mines, farms, ranches, and forests to eastern markets and carried manufactured goods to the West. The railroads reorganized time itself. In 1883, the major companies divided the nation into the four time zones still in use today. The growing population formed an ever-expanding market for the mass production, mass distribution, and mass marketing of goods, essential elements of a modern industrial economy. The spread of national brands like Ivory soap and Quaker Oats symbolized the continuing integration of the economy. So did the growth of national chains, most prominently the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A & P grocery stores. Based in Chicago, the national mail-order firms Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold clothing, jewelry, farm equipment, and numerous other goods to rural families throughout the country. TH E SECO N D I N DUS T R I A L R E V O L U T I O N ★ 607 The Spirit of Innovation A remarkable series of technological innovations spurred rapid communication and economic growth. The opening of the Atlantic cable in 1866 made it possible to send electronic telegraph messages instantaneously between the United States and Europe. During the 1870s and 1880s, the telephone, typewriter, and handheld camera came into use. Scientific breakthroughs poured forth from research laboratories in Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, created by the era’s greatest inventor, Thomas A. Edison. During the course of his life, Edison helped to establish entirely new industries that transformed private life, public entertainment, and economic activity, including the phonograph, lightbulb, motion picture, and a system for generating and distributing electric power. He opened the first electric generating station in Manhattan in 1882 to provide power to streetcars, factories, and private homes, and he established, among other companies, the forerunner of General Electric to market electrical equipment. The spread of electricity was essential to industrial and urban growth, providing a more reliable and flexible source of power than water or steam. However, it was not Edison but another inventor, Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb born in m odern-day Croatia who emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-eight, who developed an electric motor using the system of alternating current that overcame many of the challenges of using electricity for commercial and industrial purposes. Competition and Consolidation Economic growth was dramatic but highly volatile. The combination of a market flooded with goods and the federal monetary policies (discussed later) that removed money from the national economy led to a relentless fall in prices. The world economy suffered prolonged downturns in the 1870s and 1890s. Indeed, before the 1930s, the years from 1873 to 1897 were known throughout the world as the Great Depression. Businesses engaged in ruthless competition. Railroads and other companies tried various means of bringing order to the chaotic marketplace. They formed “pools” that divided up markets between supposedly competing firms and fixed prices. They established trusts—legal devices whereby the affairs of several rival companies were managed by a single director. Such efforts to coordinate the economic activities of independent companies generally proved s hort-lived, disintegrating as individual firms continued their intense pursuit of profits. To avoid cutthroat competition, more and more corporations battled to control entire industries. Many companies fell by the wayside or were gobbled up by others. The process of economic concentration culminated between 608 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial society after the Civil War? 1897 and 1904, when some 4,000 firms vanished into larger corporations that served national markets and exercised an unprecedented degree of control over the marketplace. By the time the wave of mergers had been completed, giant corporations like U.S. Steel (created by financier J. P. Morgan in 1901 by combining eight large steel companies into the first billion-dollar economic enterprise), Standard Oil, and International Harvester (a manufacturer of agricultural machinery) dominated major parts of the economy. The Rise of Andrew Carnegie In an era without personal or corporate income taxes, some business leaders accumulated enormous fortunes and economic power. Under the aggressive leadership of Thomas A. Scott, the Pennsylvania R ailroad—for a time the nation’s largest corporation—forged an economic empire that stretched across the continent and included coal mines and oceangoing steamships. With an army of professional managers to oversee its far-flung activities, the railroad pioneered modern techniques of business organization. Another industrial giant was Andrew Carnegie, who emigrated with his family from his native Scotland at the age of thirteen and as a teenager worked in a Pennsylvania textile factory. During the depression that began in 1873, Carnegie set out to establish a steel company that incorporated vertical integration—that is, one that controlled every phase of the business from raw materials to transportation, manufacturing, and distribution. By the 1890s, he dominated the steel industry and had accumulated a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Carnegie’s complex of steel factories at Homestead, Pennsylvania, were the most technologically advanced in the world. Carnegie’s father, an immigrant Scottish weaver who had taken part in popular efforts to open the British political system to working-class participation, had instilled in his son a commitment to democracy and social equality. From his mother, Carnegie learned that life was a ceaseless struggle in which one must strive to get ahead or sink beneath the waves. His life reflected the tension between these elements of his upbringing. Believing that the rich had a moral obligation to promote the advancement of society, Carnegie denounced the “worship of money” and distributed much of his wealth to various philanthropies, especially the creation of public libraries in towns throughout the country. But he ran his companies with a dictatorial hand. His factories operated nonstop, with two twelve-hour shifts every day of the year except the Fourth of July. The Triumph of John D. Rockefeller If any single name became a byword for enormous wealth, it was John D. Rockefeller, who began his working career as a clerk for a Cleveland merchant TH E SECO N D I N DUS T R I A L R E V O L U T I O N ★ 609 U . S . S T E E L : A V E R T I C A L LY I N T E G R AT E D C O R P O R AT I O N La ke VERMONT Lake Mich ro n igan WISCONSIN Hu MINNESOTA Lake Ontari MICHIGAN IOWA Cleveland (see inset) eE Lak NEW HAMPSHIRE o NEW YORK MASSACHUSETTS rie RHODE ISLAND CONNECTICUT PENNSYLVANIA INDIANA OHIO ILLINOIS NEW JERSEY Pittsburgh (see inset) DELAWARE WEST VIRGINIA MISSOURI MAINE MARYLAND VIRGINIA KENTUCKY TENNESSEE Atlantic Oce an NORTH CAROLINA ARKANSAS SOUTH CAROLINA MISSISSIPPI LOUISIANA Firms Incorporated into U.S. Steel: Type of plant: Blast furnace Rolling mill, steel work Bridge-building plant Companies: The Carnegie Co. Federal Steel Co. National Steel Co. National Tube Co. American Tin Plate Co. American Steel Hoop Co. American Sheet Steel Co. American Bridge Co. Lake Superior Iron Mines American Steel and Wire Co. of New Jersey GEORGIA ALABAMA New Kensington Pittsburgh Monroeville McKeesport FLORIDA Lake Erie Gulf of Mexico Cleveland 0 0 100 100 200 miles 200 kilometers and rose to dominate the oil industry. He drove out rival firms through cutthroat competition, arranging secret deals with railroad companies, and fixing prices and production quotas. Rockefeller began with horizontal expansion—buying out competing oil refineries. But like Carnegie, he soon established a vertically integrated monopoly, which controlled the drilling, refining, storage, and distribution of oil. By the 1880s, his Standard Oil Company controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil industry. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller gave much of his fortune away, establishing foundations to promote education and medical research. And like Carnegie, he bitterly fought his employees’ efforts to organize unions. These and other industrial leaders inspired among ordinary Americans a combination of awe, admiration, and hostility. Depending on one’s point of view, 610 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial society after the Civil War? they were “captains of industry,” whose energy and vision pushed the economy forward, or “robber barons,” who wielded power without any accountability in an unregulated marketplace. Most rose from modest backgrounds and seemed examples of how inventive genius and business sense enabled Americans to seize opportunities for success. But their dictatorial attitudes, unscrupulous methods, repressive labor policies, and exercise of power without any democratic control led to fears that they were undermining political and economic freedom. Concentrated wealth degraded the political process, declared Henry Demarest Lloyd in Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), an exposé of how Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company made a mockery of economic competition and political democracy by manipulating the market and bribing legislators. “Liberty and monopoly,” Lloyd concluded, “cannot live together.” Workers’ Freedom in an Industrial Age Remarkable as it was, the country’s economic growth distributed its benefits very unevenly. For a minority of workers, the rapidly expanding industrial system created new forms of freedom. In some industries, skilled workers commanded high wages and exercised considerable control over the production process. A worker’s economic independence now rested on technical skill rather than ownership of one’s own shop and tools as in earlier times. What was known as “the miner’s freedom” consisted of elaborate work rules that left skilled underground workers free of managerial supervision on the job. Through their union, skilled iron-and steelworkers fixed output quotas and controlled the training of apprentices in the technique of iron rolling. These workers often knew more about the details of production than their employers did. Such “freedom,” however, applied only to a tiny portion of the industrial labor force and had little bearing on the lives of the growing army of semi skilled workers who tended machines in the new factories. For most workers, economic insecurity remained a basic fact of life. During the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, millions of workers lost their jobs or were forced to accept reductions of pay. The “tramp” became a familiar figure on the social landscape as thousands of men took to the roads in search of work. Many industrial workers labored s ixty-hour weeks with no pensions, compensation for injuries, or protections against unemployment. Although American workers received higher wages than their counterparts in Europe, they also experienced more dangerous working conditions. Between 1880 and 1900, an average of 35,000 workers perished each year in factory and mine accidents, the highest rate in the industrial world. Much of the working class remained desperately poor and to survive needed income from all family members. In 1888, the Chicago Times published a series TH E SECO N D I N DUS T R I A L R E V O L U T I O N ★ 611 of articles by reporter Nell Cusack under the title “City Slave Girls,” exposing wretched conditions among the growing number of women working for wages in the city’s homes, factories, and sweatshops. The articles unleashed a flood of letters to the editor from women workers. One woman singled out domestic service—still the largest employment category for women—as “a slave’s life,” with “long hours, late and early, seven days in the week, bossed and ordered about as before the war.” Sunshine and Shadow: Increasing Wealth and Poverty At the other end of the economic spectrum, the era w itnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth. Class divisions became more and more visible. In frontier days, all classes in San Francisco, for example, lived near the waterfront. In the late nineteenth century, upper-class families built mansions on Nob Hill and Van Ness Avenue (known as “millionaire’s row”). In eastern cities as well, the rich increasingly resided in their own exclusive neighborhoods and vacationed among members of their own class at exclusive resorts like Newport, Rhode Island. The growing urban middle class of professionals, office workers, and small b usinessmen moved to new urban and suburban neighborhoods linked to central business districts by streetcars and commuter railways. “Passion for money,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905), dominated society. Wharton’s book traced the difficulties of Lily Bart, a young woman of modest means pressured by her mother and New York high society to “barter” her beauty for marriage to a rich husband in a world where “to be poor . . . amounted to disgrace.” By 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total income as the bottom half of the population and owned more property than the remaining 99 percent. Many of the wealthiest Americans consciously pursued an aristocratic lifestyle, building palatial homes, attending exclusive social clubs, schools, and colleges, holding fancy-dress balls, and marrying into each other’s families. In 1899, the economist and social historian Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the L eisure Class, a devastating critique of an u pper-class culture focused on “conspicuous consumption”—that is, spending money not on needed or even desired goods, but simply to demonstrate the possession of wealth. One of the era’s most widely publicized spectacles was an elaborate costume ball organized in 1897 by Mrs. Bradley Martin, the daughter of a New York railroad financier. The theme was the royal court of prerevolutionary France. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was decorated to look like the palace of Versailles, the guests wore the dress of the French nobility, and the hostess bedecked herself with the actual jewels of Queen Marie Antoinette. 612 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? Not that far from the Waldorf, much of the working class lived in desperate conditions. Matthew Smith’s 1868 best- seller Sunshine and Shadow in New York opened with an engraving that contrasted department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart’s two-million-dollar mansion with housing in the city’s slums. Two decades later, Jacob Riis, in How the Other Half Lives (1890), offered a shocking account of living conditions among the urban poor, complete with photographs of apartments in dark, airless, overcrowded tenement houses. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WEST Baxter Street Court, 1890, one of numerous photographs by Jacob Riis depicting living conditions in New York City’s slums. Nowhere did capitalism penetrate more rapidly or dramatically than in the trans-Mississippi West, whose “vast, trackless spaces,” as the poet Walt Whitman called them, were now absorbed into the expanding economy. At the close of the Civil War, the frontier of continuous white settlement did not extend very far beyond the Mississippi River. To the west lay millions of acres of fertile and m ineral-rich land roamed by giant herds of buffalo whose meat and hides provided food, clothing, and shelter for a population of more than 250,000 Indians. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave a celebrated lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he argued that on the western frontier the distinctive qualities of American culture were forged: individual freedom, political democracy, and economic mobility. The West, he added, acted as a “safety valve,” drawing off those dissatisfied with their situation in the East and therefore counteracting the threat of social unrest. Turner’s was one of the most influential interpretations of American history ever developed. But his lecture summarized attitudes toward the West that had been widely shared among Americans long before 1893. Ever since the beginning of colonial settlement in British North America, the West—a region whose definition shifted as the population e xpanded—had been seen as a place of opportunity for those seeking to improve their condition in life. TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 613 Many Americans did indeed experience the westward movement in the way Turner described it. From farmers moving into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the decades after the American Revolution to prospectors who struck it rich in the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Americans and immigrants from abroad found in the westward movement a path to economic opportunity. But Turner seemed to portray the West as an empty space before the coming of white settlers. In fact, of course, it was already inhabited by Native Americans, whose dispossession was essential to the opening of land for settlement by others. Moreover, the West was hardly a uniform paradise of small, independent farmers. Landlords, railroads, and mining companies in the West also utilized Mexican migrant and indentured labor, Chinese working on long- term contracts, and, until the end of the Civil War, African-American slaves. A Diverse Region The West, of course, was hardly a single area. West of the Mississippi River lay a variety of regions, all marked by remarkable physical b eauty—the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the desert of the Southwest, the Sierra Nevada, and the valleys and coastline of California and the Pacific Northwest. It would take many decades before individual settlers and corporate business enterprises penetrated all these areas. But the process was far advanced by the end of the nineteenth century. The political and economic incorporation of the American West was part of a global process. In many parts of the world, indigenous inhabitants—the Mapuche in Chile, the Zulu in South Africa, Aboriginal peoples in Australia, American Indians—were pushed aside (often after fierce resistance) as centralizing governments brought large interior regions under their control. In the United States, the incorporation of the West required the active intervention of the federal government, which acquired Indian land by war and treaty, administered land sales, regulated territorial politics, and distributed land and money to farmers, railroads, and mining companies. Western states used land donated by the federal government, in accordance with the Morrill Land- Grant Act passed during the Civil War, to establish public universities. And, of course, the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment decided the long contest over whether the West would be a society based on free or slave labor. Newly created western territories such as Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas remained under federal control far longer than had been the pattern in the East. Eastern territories had taken an average of thirteen years to achieve statehood; it took New Mexico sixty-two years to do so, Arizona forty- nine, and Utah forty-six. Many easterners were wary of granting statehood to 614 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? the territories until white and n on- Mormon settlers counterbalanced the large Latino and Mormon populations. In the twentieth century, the construction of federally financed irrigation systems and dams would open large areas to commercial farming. Ironically, the West would become known (not least to its own inhabitants) as a place of rugged individualism and sturdy independence. But without active governmental assistance, the region could never have been settled and developed. Farming on the Middle Border Even as sporadic Indian wars raged, settlers poured into the West. Territorial Having been granted millions of acres of land and state governments eager for popu- by the federal and state governments, railroads sought to encourage emigration to the West so lation, and railroad companies anxious they could sell real estate to settlers. This is a to sell land they had acquired from the post–Civil War advertisement by a Texas railroad. government, flooded European countries and eastern cities with promotional literature promising easy access to land. More land came into cultivation in the thirty years after the Civil War than in the previous two and a half centuries of American history. Hundreds of thousands of families acquired farms under the Homestead Act, and even more purchased land from speculators and from railroad companies that had been granted immense tracts of public land by the federal government. A new agricultural empire producing wheat and corn for national and international markets arose on the Middle Border (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas), whose population rose from 300,000 in 1860 to 5 million in 1900. The farmers were a diverse group, including native-born easterners, blacks escaping the post-Reconstruction South, and immigrants from Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, and Great Britain. Although ethnic diversity is generally associated with eastern cities, in the late nineteenth century the most multicultural state in the Union was North Dakota. Despite the promises of promotional pamphlets, farming on the Great Plains was not an easy task. Difficulties came in many forms—from the poisonous rattlesnakes that lived in the tall prairie grass to the blizzards and droughts that TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 615 periodically afflicted the region. Much of the burden fell on women. Farm families generally invested in the kinds of labor-saving machinery that would bring in cash, not machines that would ease women’s burdens in the household (like the backbreaking task of doing laundry). While husbands and sons tended to devote their labor to cash crops, farm wives cared for animals, grew crops for food, and cooked and cleaned. A farm woman in Arizona described her morning chores in her diary: “Get up, turn out my chickens, draw a pail of water . . . make a fire, put potatoes to cook, brush and sweep half inch of dust off floor, feed three litters of chickens, then mix biscuits, get breakfast, milk, besides work in the house, and this morning had to go half mile after calves.” On far-flung homesteads, many miles from schools, medical care, and sources of entertainment, farm families suffered from loneliness and isolation—a problem especially severe for women when their husbands left, sometimes for weeks at a time, to market their crops. Bonanza Farms John Wesley Powell, the explorer and geologist who surveyed the Middle Border in the 1870s, warned that because of the region’s arid land and limited rainfall, development there required large-scale irrigation projects. The model of family farming envisioned by the Homestead Act of 1862 could not apply: no single family could do all the work required on irrigated farms—only cooperative, communal farming could succeed, Powell maintained. Despite the emergence of a few bonanza farms that covered thousands of acres and employed large numbers of agricultural wage workers, family farms still dominated the t rans-Mississippi West. Even small farmers, however, became increasingly oriented to national and international markets, specializing in the production of single crops for sale in faraway places. At the same time, railroads brought factory-made goods to rural people, replacing items previously produced in farmers’ homes. Farm families became more and more dependent on loans to purchase land, machinery, and industrial products, and more and more vulnerable to the ups and downs of prices for agricultural goods in the world market. Agriculture reflected how the international economy was becoming more integrated. The combination of economic depressions and expanding agricultural production in places like Argentina, Australia, and the American West pushed prices of farm products steadily downward. From Italy and Ireland to China, India, and the American South, small farmers throughout the world suffered severe difficulties in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many joined the migration to cities within their countries or the increasing international migration of labor. The future of western farming ultimately lay with giant agricultural enterprises relying heavily on irrigation, chemicals, and machinery—investments far beyond the means of family farmers. A preview of the agricultural future 616 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? was already evident in California, where, as far back as Spanish and Mexican days, landownership had been concentrated in large units. In the late nineteenth century, California’s giant fruit and vegetable farms, owned by corporations like the Southern Pacific Railroad, were tilled not by agricultural laborers who could expect to acquire land of their own, but by migrant laborers from China, the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico, who tramped from place to place following the ripening crops. In the 1870s, California’s “wheat barons,” who owned ranches of 30,000 or more acres, shipped their grain from San Francisco all the way to Great Britain, while l arge-scale growers in the new “Orange Empire” of the southern part of the state sent fruit east by rail, packaged in crates bedecked with images of an Edenic landscape filled with lush orchards. The Cowboy and the Corporate West The two decades following the Civil War also witnessed the golden age of the cattle kingdom. The Kansas Pacific Railroad’s stations at Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, Kansas, became destinations for the fabled drives of millions of cattle from Texas. A collection of white, Mexican, and black men who conducted the cattle drives, the cowboys became symbols of a life of freedom on the open range. Their exploits would later serve as the theme of many a Hollywood movie, and their clothing inspired fashions that remain popular today. But there was nothing romantic about the life of the cowboys, most of whom were low-paid wage workers. (Texas cowboys even went on strike for higher pay in 1883.) The days of the long-distance cattle drive ended in the m id-1880s, as farmers enclosed more and more of the open range with barbed-wire fences, making it difficult to graze cattle on the grasslands of the Great Plains, and two terrible winters destroyed millions of cattle. When the industry recuperated, it was reorganized in large, enclosed ranches close to rail connections. The West was more than a farming empire. By 1890, a higher percentage of its population lived in cities than was the case in other regions. The economic focus of California’s economy remained San Francisco, a major manufacturing center and one of the world’s great trading ports. The explosive growth of southern California began in the 1880s, first with tourism, heavily promoted by railroad companies, followed by the discovery of oil in Los Angeles in 1892. Large corporate enterprises appeared throughout the West. The lumber industry, dominated by small-scale producers in 1860, came under the control of corporations that acquired large tracts of forest and employed armies of loggers. Lumbermen had cut trees in the Far West’s vast forests since the days of Spanish and Mexican rule. Now, with rising demand for wood for buildings in urban centers and with new railroads making it possible to send timber quickly to the TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 617 East, production expanded rapidly. Sawmills sprang up near rail lines, and lumber companies acquired thousands of acres of timber land. Loggers who had migrated from the East and Midwest and were used to cutting pine trees had to develop new techniques for felling the far larger giant redwoods of northern California. Once they did, coastal forests were decimated, with the h igh-quality wood being used to construct many of the buildings in San Francisco and other communities. In the early twentieth century, the desire to save the remaining redwoods would become one inspiration for the conservation movement. Western mining, from Michigan iron ore and copper to gold and silver in California, Nevada, and Colorado, fell under the sway of companies that mobilized eastern and European investment to introduce advanced technology. Gold and silver rushes took place in the Dakotas in 1876, Idaho in 1883, Colorado in the 1890s, and Alaska at the end of the century. Railroad hubs like Albuquerque, Denver, El Paso, and Tucson flourished as gateways to the new mineral regions. But as in California after 1848, the independent prospector working a surface mine with his pick and shovel quickly gave way to d eep- shaft corporate mining employing wage workers. As with other western industries, the coming of the railroad greatly expanded the possibilities for mining, making it possible to ship minerals from previously inaccessible places. Moreover, professionally trained engineers from the East and Europe introduced new scientific techniques of mining and smelting ore. For example, the town of Leadville, Colorado, which did not exist before the m id-1870s, became one of the world’s great centers of lead production after August R. Meyer, a European mining engineer, analyzed the precise content of silver and lead in the area’s minerals. The economic crosscurrents at work in post–Civil War mining were illustrated at Butte, Montana. In the 1880s, absentee owners from San Francisco poured millions of dollars into what they thought was a silver mine, only to learn that they had acquired one of the world’s richest deposits of copper. A new town, Anaconda, quickly arose, with a population of 2,000 miners, smelters, engineers, and others, from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. In the early twentieth century, the company would be acquired by bankers and other investors from the East. A similar process occurred in New Mexico, where traditional life based on sheep farming on land owned in common by Mexican villagers had continued more or less unchanged after the United States acquired the area in the Mexican War. The existence of these Spanish and Mexican communal landholdings may have influenced John Wesley Powell’s recommendations concerning communal farming. Railroads reached the area in the 1870s, bringing with them eastern mining companies and commercial ranchers and farmers. Because courts only recognized Mexican-era land titles to individual plots of land, communal landholdings were increasingly made available for sale to newcomers. By 1880, 618 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? THE INDUSTRIAL WEST Seattle CANADA Everett WASHINGTON MONTANA NOR Sn a IDAHO ke ur iR CE Ogden U N ION PACIFIC Co Dodge City IC Fort Worth ARKANSAS LOUISIANA Austin PA C IFIC San Antonio MEXICO Houston New Orleans o Ri Mining regions Copper Gold Iron ore Silver St. Louis Dallas TEXAS SOUTH ERN Sedalia MISSOURI INDIAN TERRITORY Albuquerque El Paso Kansas City Wichita NEW MEXICO TERRITORY CI F PA Tucson S PACIFIC Abilene Ellsworth Pueblo Atchison KANSAS ARIZONA TERRITORY IOWA ILLINOIS SA N COLORADO r ive oR Omaha KA ad lor Denver WISCONSIN i ve r NEBRASKA Ogallala UTAH S OUTHERN Gra n 0 0 100 200 miles e d Major railroads Cattle trail Oil Citrus Timber St. Paul sso WYOMING IC R AL PACIF CALIFORNIA Pa c i f i c Ocean MINNESOTA Mi ver Virginia City Sacramento NEVADA San Francisco Los Angeles Duluth Fargo Bismarck PACIFIC SOUTH DAKOTA Promontory Point NT T H E RN Rive r OREGON Ri NORTH Grand DAKOTA Forks Helena Butte Missi ssip pi SO U TH ERN PAC IF IC Spokane Portland Gulf of Mexico 100 200 kilometers t hree-quarters of New Mexico’s sheep belonged to just twenty families. Unable to continue as sheep raisers, more and more Hispanic residents went to work for the new mines and railroads. The Chinese Presence Chinese immigration, which had begun at the time of the California gold rush, continued in the postwar years. Before the Civil War, nearly all Chinese newcomers had been unattached men, brought in by labor contractors to TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 619 work in western gold fields, railroad construction, and factories. In the early 1870s, entire Chinese families began to immigrate. By 1880, 105,000 persons of Chinese descent lived in the United States. Three-quarters lived in California, where Chinese made up over half of the state’s farm workers. But Chinese immigrants were present throughout the West and in all sorts of jobs. After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, many worked in construction on other railroad lines that sprang up throughout the region. Chinese could be found in mines in Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada, as domestic workers in urban households, and in factories producing cigars, clothing, and shoes in western cities. They built levees, drained agricultural fields, and worked on fishing boats. Many men had wives and children in China, and like members of other immigrant groups, they kept in touch by sending letters and money to their families at home and reading magazines aimed at emigrants that reported on local events in China. As will be related in the next chapter, their growing presence sparked an outpouring of anti-Chinese sentiment, leading to laws excluding virtually all Chinese from entering the country. Conflict on the Mormon Frontier The Mormons had moved to the Great Salt Lake Valley in the 1840s, hoping to practice their religion free of the persecution that they had encountered in the East. They envisioned their community in Utah as the foundation of a great empire they called Deseret. Given the widespread unpopularity of Mormon polygamy and the close connection of church and state in Mormon theology, conflict with both the federal government and the growing numbers of n on- Mormons moving west became inevitable. In 1857, after receiving reports that the work of federal judges in Utah was being obstructed by the territorial governor, the Mormon leader Brigham Young, President James Buchanan removed Young and appointed a non-Mormon to replace him. Young refused to comply, and federal troops entered the Salt Lake Valley, where they remained until the beginning of the Civil War. During this time of tension, a group of Mormons attacked a wagon train of n on-Mormon settlers traveling through Utah and intending to settle in California. What came to be called the Mountain Meadows Massacre resulted in the death of all the adults and older children in the wagon train—over 100 persons. Only a handful of young children survived. Nearly twenty years later, one leader of the assault was convicted of murder and executed. After the Civil War, Mormon leaders sought to avoid further antagonizing the federal government. In the 1880s, Utah banned the practice of polygamy, a prohibition written into the state constitution as a requirement before Utah gained admission as a state in 1896. 620 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? The Subjugation of the Plains Indians The transcontinental railroad, a symbol of the reunited nation, brought tens of thousands of newcomers to the West and stimulated the expansion of farming, mining, and other enterprises. The incorporation of the West into the national economy spelled the doom of the Plains Indians and their world. Their lives had already undergone profound transformations. In the eighteenth century, the spread of horses, originally introduced by the Spanish, led to a wholesale shift from farming and hunting on foot to mounted hunting of buffalo. New Indian groups migrated to the Great Plains to take advantage of the horse, coalescing into the great tribes of the nineteenth century—the Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux. Persistent warfare took place between the more established tribes and newcomers, including Indians removed from the East, who sought access to their hunting grounds. Most migrants on the Oregon and California Trails before the Civil War encountered little hostility from Indians, often trading with them for food and supplies. But as settlers encroached on Indian lands, bloody conflict between the army and Plains tribes began in the 1850s and continued for decades. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant announced a new “peace policy” in the West, but warfare soon resumed. Drawing on methods used to defeat the Confederacy, Civil War generals like Philip H. Sheridan set out to destroy the foundations of the Indian economy— villages, horses, and especially the buffalo. Hunting by mounted Indians had already reduced the buffalo population—estimated at 30 million in 1800—but it was army campaigns and the depredations of hunters seeking buffalo hides that rendered the vast herds all but extinct. By 1886, an expedition from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington had difficulty finding t wenty-five “good specimens.” “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell,” said the Sioux leader Sitting Bull, “a death-wind for my people.” “Let Me Be a Free Man” The army’s relentless attacks broke the power of one tribe after another. In 1877, troops commanded by former Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard pursued the Nez Percé Indians on a 1,700-mile chase across the Far West. The Nez Percé (whose name was given them by Lewis and Clark in 1805 and means “pierced nose” in French) were seeking to escape to Canada after fights with settlers who had encroached on tribal lands in Oregon and Idaho. After four months, Howard forced the Indians to surrender, and they were removed to Oklahoma. Two years later, the Nez Percé leader, Chief Joseph, delivered a speech in Washington to a distinguished audience that included President TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 621 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé Indians, in Washington, D.C. (1879) Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Percé Indians, led his people on a 1,700-mile trek through the Far West in 1877 in an unsuccessful effort to escape to Canada. Two years later, he addressed an audience in Washington, D.C., that included President Rutherford B. Hayes, appealing for the freedom and equal rights enshrined in the law after the Civil War. I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men. . . . Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the . . . broken promises. . . . If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. . . . When I think of our condition my heart is heavy. I see men of my race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals. I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. . . . Let me be a free m an—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty. 622 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge From Letter by Saum Song Bo, American Missionary (October 1885) During the 1880s, C hinese-Americans were subjected to discrimination in every phase of their lives. In 1882, Congress temporarily barred further immigration from China. In 1885, when funds were being raised to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, Saum Song Bo, a C hinese-American writer, contrasted the celebration of liberty with the treatment of the Chinese. A paper was presented to me yesterday for inspection, and I found it to be specially drawn up for subscription among my countrymen toward the Pedestal Fund of the . . . Statue of Liberty. . . . But the word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese. I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a statue of Liberty. That statue represents Liberty holding a torch which lights the passage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about everywhere free from the insults, abuses, assaults, wrongs, and injuries from which men of other nationalities are free? . . . And this statue of Liberty is a gift from another people who do not love liberty for the Chinese. [To] the Annamese and Tonquinese Chinese [colonial subjects of the French empire in Indochina], . . . liberty is as dear as to the French. What right QU E STIONS have the French to deprive them of their liberty? 1. What are Chief Joseph’s complaints about Whether this statute against the Chithe treatment of his people? nese or the statue to Liberty will be the 2. Why does Saum Song Bo believe that the Chimost lasting monument to tell future nese do not enjoy liberty in the United States? ages of the liberty and greatness of this 3. What are the similarities and differences in country, will be known only to future the definition of freedom in the two documents? generations. V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 623 Rutherford B. Hayes. Condemning the policy of confining Indians to reservations, Joseph adopted the language of freedom and equal rights before the law so powerfully reinforced by the Civil War and Reconstruction. “Treat all men alike,” he pleaded. “Give them the same law. . . . Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to . . . think and talk and act for myself.” The government eventually transported the surviving Nez Percé to another reservation in Washington Territory. Until his death in 1904, Joseph would unsuccessfully petition successive presidents for his people’s right to return to their beloved Oregon homeland. Indians occasionally managed to inflict costly delay and even defeat on army units. The most famous Indian victory took place in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when General George A. Custer and his entire command of 250 men perished. The Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were defending tribal land in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. Reserved for them in an 1868 treaty “for as long as the grass shall grow,” their lands had been invaded by whites after the discovery of gold. Eventually the Sioux were worn down, partly because of the decimation of the buffalo, and relinquished their claim to the Black Hills. In the Southwest, Cochise, Geronimo, and other leaders of the Apache, who had been relocated by the government a number of times, led bands that crossed and recrossed the border with Mexico, evading the army and occasionally killing civilians. They would not surrender until the mid-1880s. Another casualty was the Comanche empire, centered in m odern-day New Mexico and Colorado. Beginning in the m id-eighteenth century, the Comanche dominated much of the Great Plains and Southwest. The Comanche subordinated local Indian groups to their power, imposed a toll on trade routes like the Santa Fe Trail, and dealt for a time as an equal with the Spanish, French, and American governments. Their power was not finally broken until the 1870s. Remaking Indian Life “The life my people want is a life of freedom,” Sitting Bull declared. The Indian idea of freedom, however, which centered on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and control of ancestral lands, conflicted with the interests and values of most white Americans. Nearly all officials believed that the federal government should persuade or force the Plains Indians to surrender most of their land and to exchange their religion, communal property, nomadic way of life, and gender relations for Christian worship, private ownership, and small farming on reservations with men tilling the fields and women working in the home. In 1871, Congress eliminated the treaty system that dated back to the revolutionary era, by which the federal government negotiated agreements with 624 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? This pencil-and-crayon drawing by a Cheyenne Indian from the 1880s depicts a Native American fighting two black members of the U.S. military. After the Civil War, black soldiers, whose presence was resented by many whites, in the North as well as the South, were reassigned to the West. Indians as if they were independent nations. This step was supported by railroad companies that found tribal sovereignty an obstacle to construction and by Republicans who believed that it contradicted the national unity born of the Civil War. The federal government pressed forward with its assault on Indian culture. The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding schools where Indian children, removed from the “negative” influences of their parents and tribes, were dressed in n on-Indian clothes, given new names, and educated in white ways. The Dawes Act The crucial step in attacking “tribalism” came in 1887 with the passage of the Dawes Act, named for Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, chair of the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee. The Act broke up the land of nearly all tribes into small parcels to be distributed to Indian families, with the remainder auctioned off to white purchasers. Indians who accepted the farms and “adopted the habits of civilized life” would become full-fledged American citizens. The policy proved to be a disaster, leading to the loss of much tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions. Whites, however, benefited enormously. When the government made 2 million acres of Indian land available in Oklahoma, 50,000 white settlers poured into the territory to claim farms on the single day of April 22, 1889. Further land rushes followed in the 1890s. In the half century after the passage of the Dawes Act, Indians lost 86 million of the 138 million acres of land in their possession in 1887. Overall, according to one estimate, between 1776 and today, via the “right of discovery,” treaties, executive orders, court decisions, and outright theft, the United States has acquired over 1.5 billion acres of land from Native Americans, an area twenty-five times as large as Great Britain. TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 625 ES TC OA STA L TR I B ES I N D I A N R E S E R VAT I O N S , C A . 1 8 9 0 COLVILLE SPOKAN COEUR D'ALENE FLATHEAD W WASHINGTON N TH OR YAKIMA UMATILLA WARM SPRING SIOUX & ASSINIBOIN CROW IDAHO CANADA CHIPPEWA SIOUX NORTH DAKOTA NORTHERN CHEYENNE SIOUX TRIBES SHOSHONE & ARAPAHO PONCA NEBRASKA PAIUTE UTE NEVADA UTAH TERRITORY PAIUTE CALIFORNIA MOAPA RIVER TULE RIVER MISSION INDIANS SUPPAI HOPI HUALPAI MOHAVE ARIZONA TERRITORY YUMA Pac i f i c O c ea n PIMA KANSAS APACHE NEW MEXICO TERRITORY PAPAGO MARICOPA MESCALERO APACHE PAPAGO TEXAS MEXICO 0 MUNSEE SAC & FOX ILLINOIS CHIPPEWA MISSOURI INDIANA KENTUCKY INDIAN TERRITORY PUEBLO 0 Indian reservations IOWA WINNEBAGO OMAHA JICARILLA APACHE NAVAJO ZUÑI MICHIGAN SAC & FOX KICKAPOO POTTAWATOMI COLORADO UTE MOHAVE WISCONSIN SIOUX SIOUX WYOMING SHOSHONE & PAIUTE POMO CHIPPEWA TRIBES MINNESOTA SOUTH DAKOTA SHOSHONE & BANNOCK KLAMATH HOOPA VALLEY ROUND VALLEY MONTANA NEZ PERCÉ OREGON KLAMATH RIVER MANDAN HIDATSA MINITARI REE BLACKFEET 200 200 400 miles Peoria Chilocco Ottawa Kansas Wyandotte CHEROKEE Tonkawa OUTLET Ponca Osage Otoe & Missouri Cherokee Iowa Pawnee Cheyenne & Sac & Fox Arapaho Kickapoo Wichita Creek Caddo Pottawatomie Comanche Seminole Choctaw Kiowa Apache Chickasaw Quapaw Modoc Shawnee Seneca 400 kilometers By 1890, the vast majority of the remaining Indian population had been removed to reservations scattered across the western states. Indian Citizenship Many laws and treaties in the nineteenth century offered Indians the right to become American citizens if they left the tribal setting and assimilated into American society. But tribal identity was the one thing nearly every Indian wished to maintain, and very few took advantage of these offers. Thus, few Indians were recognized as American citizens. Western courts ruled that the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not apply to them, and in Elk v. Wilkins (1884) the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, even though John Elk had left his tribe in Oklahoma and lived among white settlers in Nebraska. The Court questioned whether any Indian had achieved the degree of “civilization” required of American citizens. By 1900, roughly 53,000 Indians had become American citizens by accepting land allotments under the Dawes Act. The following year, Congress granted citizenship to 100,000 residents of Indian Territory (in p resent-day Oklahoma). The remainder would have to wait until 1919 (for those who fought in World War I) and 1924, when Congress made all Indians American citizens. 626 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Some Indians sought solace in the Ghost Dance, a religious revitalization campaign reminiscent of the pan-Indian movements led by earlier prophets like Neolin and Tenskwatawa (discussed in Chapters 4 and 8). Its leaders foretold a day when whites would disappear, the buffalo would return, and Indians could once again practice their ancestral customs “free from misery, death, and disease.” Large numbers of Indians gathered for days of singing, dancing, and religious observances. Fearing a general uprising, the government sent troops to the reservations. On December 29, 1890, soldiers opened fire on Ghost Dancers encamped near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing between 150 and 200 Indians, mostly women and children. The Wounded Knee massacre was widely applauded in the press. An Army Court of Inquiry essentially exonerated the troops and their commander, and twenty soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a recognition of exceptional heroism in battle, for their actions at Wounded Knee. Like federal efforts to exert control over the Mormons in Utah, the suppression of the Ghost Dance revealed the limits on Americans’ efforts to seek in the West the freedom to practice nonmainstream religions. The Wounded Knee massacre marked the end of four centuries of armed conflict between the continent’s native population and European settlers and their descendants. By 1900, the Indian population had fallen to 250,000, the lowest point in American history. A children’s book about Indians published around this time stated flatly, “The Indian pictured in these pages no longer exists.” Yet despite everything, Indians survived, and in the twentieth century their numbers once again would begin to grow. Settler Societies and Global Wests The conquest of the American West was part of a global process whereby settlers moved boldly into the interior of regions in temperate climates around the world, bringing their familiar crops and livestock and establishing mining and other industries. Countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as the United States, are often called “settler societies,” because immigrants from overseas quickly outnumbered and displaced the original inhabitants— unlike in India and most parts of colonial Africa, where fewer Europeans ventured and those who did relied on the labor of the indigenous inhabitants. In the late nineteenth century, even as the population of the American West grew dramatically, Canada marked the completion of its first transcontinental railroad, although the more severe climate limited the number of western settlers to a much smaller population than in the American West (and as a result, the displacement of Indians did not produce as much conflict and bloodshed). TH E TRA N SFO RM AT I O N O F T H E W E S T ★ 627 Boys from the Lakota tribe on their arrival (left) and during their stay at Carlisle, a boarding school that aimed to “civilize” Indians, by J. N. Choate, a local photographer. In many settler societies, native peoples were subjected to cultural reconstruction similar to policies in the United States. In Australia, the government gathered the Aboriginal p opulations—their numbers devastated by d isease—in “reserves” reminiscent of American Indian reservations. Australia went further than the United States in the forced assimilation of surviving Aboriginal peoples. The government removed large numbers of children from their families to be adopted by whites—a policy only abandoned in the 1970s and for which the prime minister formally apologized in 2008 in a national moment of reconciliation called Sorry Day. Myth, Reality, and the Wild West The West has long played many roles in Americans’ national s elf-consciousness. It has been imagined as a place of individual freedom and unbridled opportunity for those dissatisfied with their lives in the East and as a future empire that would dominate the continent and the world. Even as farms, mines, and cities spread over the landscape in the p ost–Civil War years, a new image of the West began to circulate—the Wild West, a lawless place ruled by cowboys and 628 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge Was the Gilded Age political system effective in meeting its goals? Indians (two groups by this time vastly outnumbered by other westerners), and marked by gunfights, cattle drives, and stagecoach robberies. This image of a violent yet romantic frontier world would later become a staple of Hollywood movies. In the late nineteenth century, it was disseminated in vaudeville shows that achieved immense popularity. Although not the first, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody was the most important popularizer of this idea of the West. A former hunter and scout for the U.S. Army, Cody developed an elaborate theatrical presentation that toured for decades across the United States and Europe. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show included reenactments of battles with Indians (including Custer’s Last Stand), buffalo hunts, Indian rituals, and feats by the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Along with Cody, other persons who had actually participated in these events appeared in the show, including the Indian warrior Sitting Bull and a group of Sioux fighters. The image of the Wild West also circulated in cheap popular books known as dime novels and sensational journalistic accounts. Theater audiences and readers found fantasies of adventure in observing western violence from a safe distance and marveled at the skills of horseback riding, roping, and shooting on display. They imagined the West as a timeless place immune to the corruptions of civilization, which offered a striking contrast to the increasingly sedentary lives of men in eastern cities. Indeed, despite the inclusion of Oakley, this West of the imagination was emphatically a male preserve. The real W est—for example, the struggles of farm families—played no role in this depiction. Nor did pervasive labor conflict in mining centers, or the role of the federal government and eastern capital in the region’s development. The West’s multiracial, multiethnic population also disappeared, although different groups added their own elements to the mythical west. Mexican-Americans, for example, made a folk hero of Gregorio Cortez, a Texas outlaw renowned for his ability to outwit pursuers. The West Coast also had no place in the picture—the imagined West seemed to stop at the Rocky Mountains. POLITICS IN A GILDED AGE The era from 1870 to 1890 is the only period of American history commonly known by a derogatory n ame—the Gilded Age, after the title of an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. “Gilded” means covered with a layer of gold, but it also suggests that the glittering surface masks a core of little real value and is therefore deceptive. Twain and Warner were referring not only to the r emarkable expansion of the economy in this period but also to the corruption caused by corporate dominance of politics and to the oppressive PO LI TI C S I N A G I L D E D A G E ★ 629 treatment of those left behind in the scramble for wealth. “Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must,” was the era’s slogan, according to The Gilded Age. The Corruption of Politics As they had earlier in the nineteenth century, Americans during the Gilded Age saw their nation as an island of political democracy in a world still dominated by undemocratic governments. In Europe, only France and Switzerland enjoyed universal male suffrage. Even in Britain, which prided itself on its tradition of political liberty, most of the working class could not vote until the passage of the Reform Act of 1884. Nonetheless, the power of the new corporations, seemingly immune to democratic control, raised disturbing questions for the American understanding of political freedom as popular s elf-government. Political corruption was rife. “The galleries and lobbies of every legislature,” observed an Illinois Republican leader, “are thronged with men seeking to procure an advantage” for one corporation or another. In Pennsylvania’s legislature, the “third house” of railroad lobbyists was said to enjoy as much influence as the elected chambers. In the West, many lawmakers held stock or directorships in lumber companies and railroads that received public aid. Urban politics fell under the sway of corrupt political machines like New York’s Tweed Ring, which plundered the city of tens of millions of dollars. “Boss” William M. Tweed’s organization reached into every neighborhood. He forged close ties with railroad men and labor unions, and he won support from the city’s immigrant poor by fashioning a kind of private welfare system that provided food, fuel, and jobs in hard times. A combination of political reformers and businessmen tired of paying tribute to the ring ousted Tweed in the early 1870s, although he remained popular among the city’s poor, who considered him an urban Robin Hood. At the national level, many lawmakers supported bills aiding companies in which they had invested money or from which they received stock or salaries. The most notorious example of corruption came to light during Grant’s presidency. This was Crédit Mobilier, a corporation formed by an inner ring of Union Pacific Railroad stockholders to oversee the line’s g overnment-assisted construction. Essentially, it enabled the participants to sign contracts with themselves, at an exorbitant profit, to build the new line. The arrangement was protected by the distribution of stock to influential politicians, including Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, who was elected vice president in 1868. In another example of corruption, the Whiskey Ring of the Grant administration united Republican officials, tax collectors, and whiskey manufacturers in a massive scheme that defrauded the federal government of millions of tax dollars. 630 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge Was the Gilded Age political system effective in meeting its goals? The Politics of Dead Center P O L I T I C A L S TA L E M AT E , 1876–1892 In national elections, party politics bore the powerful imprint of the Civil War. Republicans controlled the industrial North and Midwest and the agrarian West and were particularly strong among members of revivalist churches, Protestant immigrants, and blacks. Organizations of Union veterans formed a bulwark of RepubNon-voting territory lican support. Every Republican canElections of 1876–1892 didate for president from 1868 to 1900 Voted Democrat 4–5 times Voted Republican 4–5 times except James G. Blaine had fought in Voted more irregularly the Union army. (In the 1880 campaign, all four candidates—Republican James A. Garfield, Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, Prohibitionist Neal Dow, and James B. Weaver of the Greenback-Labor Party, discussed later—had been Union generals during the war.) By 1893, a lavish system of pensions for Union soldiers and their widows and children consumed more than 40 percent of the federal budget. Democrats, after 1877, dominated the South and did well among Catholic voters, especially Irish-Americans, in the nation’s cities. The parties were closely divided. In three of the five presidential elections between 1876 and 1892, the margin separating the major candidates was less than 1 percent of the popular vote. Twice, in 1876 and 1888, the candidate with an electoral-college majority trailed in the popular vote. The congressional elections of 1874, when Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, ushered in two decades of political stalemate. A succession of o ne-term presidencies followed: Rutherford B. Hayes (elected in 1876), James A. Garfield (succeeded, after his assassination in 1881, by Chester A. Arthur), Grover Cleveland in 1884, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Cleveland, elected for the second time, in 1892. Only for brief periods did the same party control the White House and both houses of Congress. More than once, Congress found itself paralyzed as important bills shuttled back and forth between the House and Senate, and special sessions to complete legislation became necessary. Gilded Age presidents made little effort to mobilize public opinion or exert executive leadership. Their staffs were quite small. Grover Cleveland himself answered the White House doorbell. In some ways, American democracy in the Gilded Age seemed remarkably healthy. Elections were closely contested, party loyalty was intense, and 80 percent or more of eligible voters turned out to cast ballots. It was an era of massive party rallies and spellbinding political oratory. James G. Blaine was PO LI TI C S I N A G I L D E D A G E ★ 631 among the members of Congress tainted by the Crédit Mobilier scandal, but Robert G. Ingersoll’s speech before the Republican national convention of 1876 nearly secured Blaine’s nomination for president by depicting him as a “plumed knight” who had raised his “shining lance” against the country’s enemies. Government and the Economy The nation’s political structure, however, proved ill equipped to deal with the problems created by the economy’s rapid growth. Despite its expanded scope and powers arising from the Civil War, the federal government remained remarkably small by modern standards. Activities from education to medical care, business regulation, civil and criminal prosecutions, and many others were almost entirely under the control of local and state governments or private institutions. The federal workforce in 1880 numbered 100,000 (today, it exceeds 2.5 million). Nationally, both parties came under the control of powerful political managers with close ties to business interests. Republicans strongly supported a high tariff to protect American industry, and throughout the 1870s they pursued a fiscal policy based on reducing federal spending, repaying much of the national debt, and withdrawing greenbacks—the paper money issued by the Union during the Civil W ar—from circulation. Democrats opposed the high tariff, but the party’s national leadership remained closely linked to New York bankers and financiers and resisted demands from d ebt-ridden agricultural areas for an increase in the money supply. In 1879, for the first time since the war, the United States returned to the gold standard—that is, paper currency became exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. By reducing competition from foreign manufactured goods and leaving the banks, not the government, in control of issuing money, Republican economic policies strongly favored the interests of eastern industrialists and bankers. These policies worked to the disadvantage of southern and western farmers, who had to pay a premium for manufactured goods while the prices they received for their produce steadily declined. Reform Legislation Gilded Age national politics did not entirely lack accomplishments. Inspired in part by President Garfield’s assassination by a disappointed office seeker, the Civil Service Act of 1883 created a merit system for federal employees, with appointment via competitive examinations rather than political influence. Although it applied at first to only 10 percent of government workers, the act marked the first step in establishing a professional civil service and removing 632 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge Was the Gilded Age political system effective in meeting its goals? officeholding from the hands of political machines. (However, since funds raised from political appointees had helped to finance the political parties, civil service reform had the unintended result of increasing politicians’ dependence on donations from business interests.) In 1887, in response to public outcries against railroad practices, Congress established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to ensure that the rates railroads charged farmers and merchants to transport their goods were “reasonable” and did not offer more favorable treatment to some shippers. The ICC was the first federal agency intended to regulate economic activity, but since it lacked the power to establish rates on its own—it could only sue companies in c ourt—it had little impact on railroad practices. Three years later, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which banned all combinations and practices that restrained free trade. The measure posed a significant threat to corporate efforts to dominate sectors of the economy. But the courts primarily used it as a way to suppress labor unions. Nonetheless, these laws helped to establish the precedent that the national government could regulate the economy to promote the public good. Political Conflict in the States The nation had to weather the effects of drastic economic change and periodic economic crises without leadership from Washington. At the state and local levels, however, the Gilded Age was an era of political ferment and conflict over the proper uses of governmental authority. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, state governments in the North, like those in the Reconstruction South, greatly expanded their responsibility for public health, welfare, and education, and cities invested heavily in public works such as park construction and improved water and gas services. Those who suffered from economic change called on the activist state created by the war to redress their own grievances. Third parties enjoyed significant if short- lived success in local elections. The G reenback-Labor Party proposed that the federal government stop taking “greenback” money out of circulation. This, it argued, would make more funds available for investment and give the government, not private bankers, control of the money supply. It also condemned the use of militias and private police against strikes. In the late 1870s, the party controlled local government in a number of industrial and mining communities and contributed to the election of twenty-one members of Congress independent of the two major parties. The policies of railroad companies produced a growing chorus of protest, especially in the West. Farmers and local merchants complained of excessively PO LI TI C S I N A G I L D E D A G E ★ 633 high freight rates, discrimination in favor of large producers and shippers, and high fees charged by r ailroad-controlled grain warehouses. Critics of the railroads came together in the Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, which moved to establish cooperatives for storing and marketing farm output in the hope of forcing the carriers “to take our produce at a fair price.” Founded in 1867, the Grange claimed more than 700,000 members by the mid-1870s. Its members called on state governments to establish fair freight rates and warehouse charges. In several states, the Grange succeeded in having commissions established to investigate—and, in some cases, regulate—railroad practices. At the same time, the labor movement, revitalized during the Civil War, demanded laws establishing eight hours as a legal day’s work. Seven northern legislatures passed such laws, but since most lacked strong means of enforcement they remained dead letters. But the efforts of farmers and workers to use the power of the state to counteract the inequalities of the Gilded Age inspired a far-reaching debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in an industrial society. FREEDOM IN THE GILDED AGE The Social Problem As the United States matured into an industrial economy, Americans struggled to make sense of the new social order. Debates over political economy engaged the attention of millions, reaching far beyond the tiny academic world into the public sphere inhabited by s elf-educated workingmen and farmers, reformers of all kinds, newspaper editors, and politicians. This broad public discussion produced thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles on such technical issues as land taxation and currency reform, as well as widespread debate over the social and ethical implications of economic change. Many Americans sensed that something had gone wrong in the nation’s social development. Talk of “better classes,” “respectable classes,” and “dangerous classes” dominated public discussion, and bitter labor strife seemed to have become the rule. During the Gilded Age, Congress and a number of states established investigating committees to inquire into the relations between labor and capital. Their hearings produced powerful evidence of distrust between employees and employers. In 1881, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that virtually every worker it interviewed in Fall River, the nation’s largest center of textile production, complained of overwork, poor housing, and tyrannical employers. 634 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did the economic development of the Gilded Age affect American freedom? Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy The appearance of what Massachusetts cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson called “a permanent factory population” living on the edge of poverty alongside a growing class of millionaires posed a sharp challenge to traditional definitions of freedom. “The great curse of the Old W orld—the division of society into classes,” declared The Nation, had come to America. It became increasingly difficult to view wage labor as a temporary resting place on the road to economic independence. Given the vast expansion of the nation’s productive capacity, many Americans viewed the concentration of wealth as inevitable, natural, and justified by progress. By the turn of the century, advanced economics taught that wages were determined by the iron law of supply and demand and that wealth rightly flowed not to those who worked the hardest but to men with business skills and access to money. The close link between freedom and equality, forged in the Revolution and reinforced during the Civil War, appeared increasingly out of date. The task of social science, wrote iron manufacturer Abram Hewitt, was to devise ways of making “men who are equal in liberty” content with the “inequality in . . . distribution” inevitable in modern society. Among the first to take up this challenge were the self-styled “liberal” reformers. (Their beliefs were quite different from those called liberals in modern America, who advocate that an activist government try to address social needs.) This group of editors and professionals broke with the Republican Party in 1872 and helped to bring about a change in northern opinion regarding Reconstruction. But their program was not confined to the South. Gilded Age liberals feared that with lower-class groups seeking to use government to advance their own interests, democracy was becoming a threat to individual liberty and the rights of property. Some urged a return to the long-abandoned principle that voting should be limited to property owners. During the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had reported that opponents of democracy “hide their heads.” By the 1870s, wrote one observer, “expressions of doubt and distrust in regard to universal suffrage are heard constantly . . . [at] the top of our society.” Social Darwinism in America The idea of the natural superiority of some groups to others, which before the Civil War had been invoked to justify slavery in an otherwise free society, now reemerged in the vocabulary of modern science to explain the success and failure of individuals and social classes. In 1859, the British scientist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. One of the most influential works of science ever to appear, it expounded the theory of evolution whereby plant FREEDO M I N T H E G I L D E D A G E ★ 635 and animal species best suited to their environment took the place of those less able to adapt. In a highly oversimplified form, language borrowed from Darwin or developed by his followers, such as “natural selection,” “the struggle for existence,” and “the survival of the fittest,” entered public discussion of social problems in the Gilded Age. According to what came to be called Social Darwinism, evolution was as natural a process in human society as in nature, and government must not interfere. Especially misguided, in this view, were efforts to uplift those at the bottom of the social order, such as laws regulating conditions of work or public assistance to the poor. The giant industrial corporation, Social Darwinists believed, had emerged because it was better adapted to its environment than earlier forms of enterprise. To restrict its operations by legislation would reduce society to a more primitive level. Even the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s did not shake the widespread view that the poor were essentially responsible for their own fate. Charity workers and local governments spent much time and energy distinguishing the “deserving” poor (those, like widows and orphans, destitute through no fault of their own) from the “undeserving,” a far larger number. Failure to advance in society was widely thought to indicate a lack of character, an absence of self-reliance and determination in the face of adversity. As late as 1900, half the nation’s largest cities offered virtually no public relief, except to persons living in poorhouses. To improve their lot, according to the philosophy of Social Darwinism, workers should practice personal economy, keep out of debt, and educate their children in the principles of the marketplace, not look to the government for aid. The era’s most influential Social Darwinist was Yale professor William Graham Sumner. For Sumner, freedom meant “the security given to each man” that he can acquire, enjoy, and dispose of property “exclusively as he chooses,” without interference from other persons or from government. Freedom thus defined required frank acceptance of inequality. Society faced two and only two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.” In 1883, Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. His answer, essentially, was nothing: “In a free state,” no one was entitled to claim “help from, and cannot be charged to [offer] help to, another.” Government, Sumner believed, existed only to protect “the property of men and the honor of women,” not to upset social arrangements decreed by nature. Liberty of Contract The growing influence of Social Darwinism helped to popularize an idea that would be embraced by the business and professional classes in the last quarter 636 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did the economic development of the Gilded Age affect American freedom? The Ironworkers’ Noontime, painted in 1880–1881 by Thomas Anshutz, an artist born in West Virginia, whose family owned iron factories. Unlike artists who depicted factories and workers earlier in the century, Anshutz does not try to reconcile nature and industry (there are no reminders of the natural environment). Nor does he emphasize the dignity of labor. The workers seem dwarfed by the factory, and some seem exhausted. of the nineteenth century—a “negative” definition of freedom as limited government and an unrestrained free market. Central to this social vision was the idea of contract. “The laws of contract,” wrote one reformer, “are the foundation of c ivilization.” Labor contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the workplace. So long as labor relations were governed by contracts freely arrived at by independent individuals, neither the government nor unions had a right to interfere with working conditions, and Americans had no grounds to complain of a loss of freedom. Demands by workers that the government enforce an eight-hour day, provide relief to the unemployed, or in other ways intervene in the economy struck liberals as an example of how the misuse of political power posed a threat to liberty. “The right of each man to labor as much or as little as he chooses, and to enjoy his own earnings, is the very foundation stone of . . . freedom,” wrote Chicago newspaper editor Horace White. The principle of free labor, which originated as a celebration of the independent small producer in a society of broad equality and social harmony, was transformed into a defense of the unrestrained operations of the capitalist marketplace. FREEDO M I N T H E G I L D E D A G E ★ 637 The Courts and Freedom In elevating liberty of contract from one element of freedom to its very essence, the courts played a significant role. The Fourteenth Amendment had empowered the federal government to overturn state laws that violated citizens’ rights. By the 1880s, liberty of contract, not equality before the law for former slaves, came to be defined as the amendment’s true meaning. State and federal courts regularly struck down state laws regulating economic enterprise as an interference with the right of the free laborer to choose his employment and working conditions, and of the entrepreneur to utilize his property as he saw fit. For decades, the courts viewed state regulation of b usiness—especially laws establishing maximum hours of work and safe working c onditions—as an insult to free labor. At first, the Supreme Court was willing to accept laws regulating enterprises that represented a significant “public interest.” In Munn v. Illinois, an 1877 decision, it upheld the constitutionality of an Illinois law that established a state board empowered to eliminate railroad rate discrimination and set maximum charges. Nine years later, however, in Wabash v. Illinois, the Court essentially reversed itself, ruling that only the federal government, not the states, could regulate railroads engaged in interstate commerce, as all important lines were. The decision led directly to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. But on virtually every occasion when cases brought by the ICC against railroads made their way to the Supreme Court, the company emerged victorious. The courts generally sided with business enterprises that complained of a loss of economic freedom. In 1885, the New York Court of Appeals invalidated a state law that prohibited the manufacture of cigars in tenement dwellings on the grounds that such legislation deprived the worker of the “liberty” to work “where he will.” Although women still lacked political rights, they were increasingly understood to possess the same economic “liberty,” defined in this way, as men. On the grounds that it violated women’s freedom, the Illinois Supreme Court in 1895 declared unconstitutional a state law that outlawed the production of garments in sweatshops and established a f orty-eight-hour work week for women and children. In the same year, in United States v. E. C. Knight Co., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which barred combinations in restraint of trade, could not be used to break up a sugar refining monopoly, since the Constitution empowered Congress to regulate commerce, but not manufacturing. Their unwillingness to allow regulation of the economy, however, did not prevent the courts from acting to impede labor organization. The Sherman Act, intended to prevent business mergers that stifled competition, was used by judges primarily to issue injunctions prohibiting strikes on the grounds that they illegally interfered with the freedom of trade. 638 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? In a 1905 case that became almost as notorious as Dred Scott and gave the name “Lochnerism” to the entire body of liberty of contract decisions, the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York voided a state law establishing ten hours per day or sixty per week as the maximum hours of work for bakers. The law, wrote Associate Justice Rufus Peckham for the 5-4 majority, “interfered with the right of contract between employer and employee” and therefore infringed upon individual freedom. By this time, the Court was invoking “liberty” in ways that could easily seem absurd. In one case, it overturned as a violation of “personal liberty” a Kansas law prohibiting “yellow-dog” contracts, which made nonmembership in a union a condition of employment. In another, it struck down state laws requiring payment of coal miners in money rather than paper usable only at company-owned stores. Workers, observed mine union leader John P. Mitchell, could not but feel that “they are being guaranteed the liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them.” L ABOR AND THE REPUBLIC “The Overwhelming Labor Question” As Mitchell’s remark suggests, public debate in the late nineteenth century more than at almost any other moment in American history divided along class lines. The shift from the slavery controversy to what one politician called “the overwhelming labor question” was dramatically illustrated in 1877, the year of both the end of Reconstruction and the first national labor walkout—the Great Railroad Strike. When workers protesting a pay cut paralyzed rail traffic in much of the country, militia units tried to force them back to work. After troops fired on strikers in Pittsburgh, killing twenty people, workers responded by burning the city’s railroad yards, destroying millions of dollars in property. General strikes paralyzed Chicago and St. Louis. The strike revealed both a strong sense of solidarity among workers and the close ties between the Republican Party and the new class of industrialists. President Rutherford B. Hayes, who a few months earlier had ordered federal troops in the South to end their involvement in local politics, ordered the army into the North. The workers, the president wrote in his diary, were “put down by force.” “The days are over,” declared the New York Times, “in which this country could rejoice in its freedom from the elements of social strife which have long abounded in the old countries.” In the aftermath of 1877, the federal government constructed armories in major cities to ensure that troops would be on hand in the event of further labor difficulties. Henceforth, national power would be used not to protect beleaguered former slaves, but to guarantee the rights of property. LA BO R A N D T H E R E P U B L I C ★ 639 The Strike, an 1886 painting by the German-born artist Robert Koehler, who had grown up in a working-class family in Milwaukee. Koehler depicts a confrontation between a factory owner, dressed in a silk top hat, and angry workers. A woman and her children, presumably members of a striker’s family, watch from the side while another woman, at the center, appears to plead for restraint. The threat of violence hangs in the air, and a striker in the lower right-hand corner reaches for a stone. The painting was inspired by events in Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The Knights of Labor and the “Conditions Essential to Liberty” The 1880s witnessed a new wave of labor organizing. At its center stood the Knights of Labor. The Knights were the first group to try to organize unskilled workers as well as skilled, women alongside men, and blacks as well as whites (although even the Knights excluded the despised Asian immigrants on the West Coast). The group reached a peak membership of nearly 800,000 in 1886 (making it the largest labor organization of the nineteenth century) and involved millions of workers in strikes, boycotts, political action, and educational and social activities. Labor reformers of the Gilded Age put forward a wide array of programs, from the eight-hour day to public employment in hard times, currency reform, anarchism, socialism, and the creation of a vaguely defined “cooperative commonwealth.” All these ideas arose from the conviction that the social conditions of the 1880s needed drastic change. Americans, declared Terence V. Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor, were not “the free people that we imagine we are.” 640 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? The labor movement launched a sustained assault on the understanding of freedom grounded in Social Darwinism and liberty of contract. Because of unrestrained economic growth and political corruption, the Knights charged, ordinary Americans had lost control of their economic livelihoods and their own government. Reaching back across the divide of the Civil War, labor defined employers as a new “slave power.” Concentrated capital, warned George E. McNeill, a shoemaker and factory worker who became one of the movement’s most eloquent writers, was now “a greater power than that of the state.” “Extremes of wealth and poverty,” he warned, threatened the very existence of democratic government. The remedy was to “engraft republican principles into our industrial system” by guaranteeing a basic set of economic rights for all Americans. Labor raised the question whether meaningful freedom could exist in a situation of extreme economic inequality. On July 4, 1886, the Federated Trades of the Pacific Coast rewrote the Declaration of Independence. Workers, the new Declaration claimed, had been subjected not to oppressive government but to “the unjust domination of a special class.” It went on to list among mankind’s inalienable rights, “Life and the means of living, Liberty and the conditions essential to liberty.” Middle-Class Reformers Dissatisfaction with social conditions in the Gilded Age extended well beyond aggrieved workers. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan in the late 1880s spoke of a “deep feeling of unease,” a widespread fear that the country “was in real danger of another kind of slavery that would result from the aggregation of capital in the hands of a few individuals.” Alarmed by fear of class warfare and the growing power of concentrated capital, social thinkers offered numerous plans for change. In the last quarter of the century, more than 150 utopian or cataclysmic novels appeared, predicting that social conflict would end either in a new, harmonious social order or in total catastrophe. One popular novel of the era, Caesar’s Column (1891) by Ignatius Donnelly, ended with civilized society destroyed in a savage civil war between labor and capital. Of the many books proposing more optimistic remedies for the unequal distribution of wealth, the most popular were Progress and Poverty (1879) by Henry George, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) by Laurence Gronlund, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). All three were among the century’s greatest best-sellers, their extraordinary success testifying to what George called “a w ide-spread consciousness . . . that there is something radically wrong in the present social organization.” All three writers, though in very different ways, sought to reclaim an imagined golden age of social harmony and American freedom. LA BO R A N D T H E R E P U B L I C ★ 641 Progress and Poverty Although it had no direct impact on government policy, Progress and Poverty probably commanded more public attention than any book on economics in American history. An antislavery newspaper editor in California in the 1850s and 1860s, Henry George had witnessed firsthand the rapid monopolization of land in the state. His book began with a famous statement of “the problem” suggested by its title—the growth of “squalor and misery” alongside material progress. His solution was the single tax, which would replace other taxes with a levy on increases in the value of real estate. The single tax would be so high that it would prevent speculation in both urban and rural land. No one knows how many of Henry George’s readers actually believed in this way of solving the nation’s ills. But millions responded to his clear explanation of economic relationships and his stirring account of how the “social distress” long thought to be confined to the Old World had made its appearance in the New. Freedom lay at the heart of George’s analysis. The “proper name” for the political movement spawned by his book, he once wrote, was “freedom men,” who would “do for the question of industrial slavery” what the Republican Party had done for the slavery of blacks. George rejected the traditional equation of liberty with ownership of land (since the single tax in effect made land the “common property” of the entire society). In other ways, however, his definition of freedom was thoroughly in keeping with mainstream thought. Despite calling for a single massive public intervention in the economy, George saw government as a “repressive power,” whose functions in the “co-operative society” of the future would be limited to enhancing the quality of l ife—building “public baths, museums, libraries, gardens,” and the like. The Cooperative Commonwealth Quite different in outlook was The Cooperative Commonwealth, the first book to popularize socialist ideas for an American audience. Its author, Laurence Gronlund, was a lawyer who had emigrated from Denmark in 1867. Socialism—the belief that private control of economic enterprises should be replaced by government ownership in order to ensure a fairer distribution of the benefits of the wealth produced—became a major political force in western Europe in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, however, where access to private property was widely considered essential to individual freedom, socialist beliefs were largely confined to immigrants, whose writings, frequently in foreign languages, attracted little attention. Gronlund began the process of socialism’s Americanization. While Karl Marx, the nineteenth century’s most influential socialist theorist, had predicted that socialism would come into being via a working-class revolution, Gronlund portrayed it as the end result of a process of peaceful evolution, not 642 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? violent upheaval. He thus made socialism seem more acceptable to m iddle- class Americans who desired an end to class conflict and the restoration of social harmony. Bellamy’s Utopia Not until the early twentieth century would socialism become a significant presence in American public life. As Gronlund himself noted, the most important result of The Cooperative Commonwealth was to prepare an audience for Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which promoted socialist ideas while “ignoring that name” (Bellamy wrote of nationalism, not socialism). Bellamy lived virtually his entire life in the small industrial city of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. In Looking Backward, his main character falls asleep in the late nineteenth century only to awaken in the year 2000, in a world where cooperation has replaced class strife, “excessive individualism,” and cutthroat competition. Inequality has been banished and with it the idea of liberty as a condition to be achieved through individual striving free of governmental restraint. Freedom, Bellamy insisted, was a social condition, resting on interdependence, not autonomy. From today’s vantage point, Bellamy’s utopia—with citizens obligated to labor for years in an Industrial Army controlled by a single Great T rust—seems a chilling social blueprint. Yet the book inspired the creation of hundreds of nationalist clubs devoted to bringing into existence the world of 2000 and left a profound mark on a generation of reformers and intellectuals. Bellamy held out the hope of retaining the material abundance made possible by industrial capitalism while eliminating inequality. In proposing that the state guarantee economic security to all, Bellamy offered a far-reaching expansion of the idea of freedom. Protestants and Moral Reform Mainstream Protestants played a major role in seeking to stamp out sin during the Gilded Age. What one historian calls a “Christian lobby” promoted political solutions to what it saw as the moral problems raised by labor conflict and the growth of cities, and threats to religious faith by Darwinism and other scientific advances. Unlike the pre–Civil War period, when “moral suasion” was the preferred approach of many reformers, powerful national organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, National Reform Association, and Reform Bureau now campaigned for federal legislation that would “Christianize the government” by outlawing sinful behavior. Among the proposed targets were the consumption of alcohol, gambling, prostitution, polygamy, and birth control. Most of these groups spoke less about improving society than stamping out the sins of individuals. In a striking departure from the prewar situation, LA BO R A N D T H E R E P U B L I C ★ 643 southerners joined in the campaign for federal regulation of individual behavior, something whites in the region had previously strongly opposed, fearing it could lead to action against slavery. The key role played by the white South in the campaign for moral legislation helped earn the region a reputation as the Bible Belt—a place where political action revolved around religious principles. Although efforts to enact a national law requiring businesses to close on Sunday failed, the Christian lobby’s efforts in the 1880s and 1890s set the stage for later legislation such as the Mann Act of 1910, banning the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes (an effort to suppress prostitution), and Prohibition. A Social Gospel Most of the era’s Protestant preachers concentrated on attacking individual sins like drinking and S abbath-breaking and saw nothing immoral about the pursuit of riches. But the outlines of what came to be called the Social Gospel were taking shape in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister in New York City, Washington Gladden, a Congregational clergyman in Columbus, Ohio, and others. They insisted that freedom and spiritual self- development required an equalization of wealth and power and that unbridled competition mocked the Christian ideal of brotherhood. The Social Gospel movement originated as an effort to reform Protestant churches by expanding their appeal in poor urban neighborhoods and making them more attentive to the era’s social ills. The movement’s adherents established missions and relief programs in urban areas that attempted to alleviate poverty, combat child labor, and encourage the construction of better w orking- class housing. They worked with the Knights of Labor and other groups demanding health and safety laws. Some suggested that a more cooperative organization of the economy should replace competitive capitalism. Within American Catholicism, as well, a group of priests and bishops emerged who attempted to alter the church’s traditional hostility to movements for social reform and its isolation from contemporary currents of social thought. With most of its parishioners working men and women, they argued, the church should lend its support to the labor movement. These developments suggested the existence of widespread dissatisfaction with the “liberty of contract” understanding of freedom. The Haymarket Affair The year of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, 1886, also witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in labor activity. Inspired by a successful strike by western railroad unions against lines controlled by the powerful financier Jay 644 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? Gould, workers flooded into the Knights of Labor. Its membership, only 100,000 in 1885, rose more than sevenfold in the following year. On May 1, 1886, some 350,000 workers in cities across the country demonstrated for an eight-hour day. Having originated in the United States, May 1, or May Day as it came to be called, soon became an annual date of parades, picnics, and protests, celebrated around the world by organized labor. The most dramatic events of 1886 took place in Chicago, a city with a large and vibrant labor movement that brought together n ative-born and immigrant workers, whose outlooks ranged from immigrant socialism and anarchism to American traditions of equality and anti-monopoly. In 1885, the iron moulders u nion—one of the most powerful organizations of skilled industrial workers in the country—had organized a strike against a wage reduction at the great McCormick plant that produced agricultural machinery. The company brought in strikebreakers and private police, who battled in the streets with the strikers. Fearing chaos, the mayor and prominent business leaders persuaded the company to settle on the union’s terms. But in February 1886, after the company installed new machinery that reduced its dependence on the iron moulders’ traditional skills, it announced that henceforth the factory would operate on a nonunion basis. The result was a bitter, prolonged strike. This time, Chicago’s city government sided with the company. On May 3, 1886, four strikers were killed by police when they attempted to prevent strikebreakers from entering the factory. The next day, a rally was held in Haymarket Square to protest the killings. Near the end of the speeches, s omeone—whose identity has never been determined—threw a bomb into the crowd, killing a policeman. The panicked police opened fire, shooting several bystanders and a number of their own force. Soon after, police raided the offices of labor and radical groups and arrested their leaders. Employers took the opportunity presented by the Haymarket Affair to paint the labor movement as a dangerous and un-American force, prone to violence and controlled by foreign-born radicals. Eight anarchists were charged with plotting and carrying out the bombing. Even though the evidence against them was extremely weak, a jury convicted the “Haymarket martyrs.” Four were hanged, one committed suicide in prison, and the remaining three were imprisoned until John Peter Altgeld, a p ro-labor governor of Illinois, commuted their sentences in 1893. Seven of the eight men accused of plotting the Haymarket bombing were foreign-born—six Germans and an English immigrant. The last was Albert Parsons, a native of Alabama who had served in the Confederate army in the Civil War and edited a Republican newspaper in Texas during Reconstruction. Fearing violence because of his political views and the fact that his wife, Lucy Parsons, was black, Albert Parsons moved to Chicago during the 1870s. Having LA BO R A N D T H E R E P U B L I C ★ 645 survived the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction Texas, Parsons perished on the Illinois gallows for a crime that he, like the other “Haymarket martyrs,” did not commit. Labor and Politics The Haymarket affair took place amid an outburst of independent labor political activity. One study has identified more than 100 local political tickets associated with the Knights of Labor between 1886 and 1888, from Anniston, Alabama, to Whitewater, Wisconsin. Their major aim was to end the use of public and private police forces and court injunctions against In a political cartoon from Frank Leslie’s Weekly, November 13, 1886, Uncle Sam congratulates strikes and labor organizations. At least a workingman for the defeat of Henry George’s sixty achieved some kind of electoral candidacy for mayor of New York City on the success. In Kansas City, a coalition of United Labor Party ticket. A disappointed anarblack and Irish-American workers and chist fulminates in the background. Local labor parties did win many local victories in 1886. middle-class voters elected Tom Hanna as mayor. He proceeded to side with unions rather than employers in industrial disputes. The most celebrated labor campaign took place in New York City, where in 1886, somewhat to his own surprise, Henry George found himself thrust into the role of labor’s candidate for mayor. George’s aim in running was to bring attention to the single tax on land. The labor leaders who organized the United Labor Party had more immediate goals in mind, especially stopping the courts from barring strikes and jailing unionists for conspiracy. George ran a spirited campaign, speaking at factories, immigrant associations, and labor parades and rallies. A few days after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, New Yorkers flocked to the polls to elect their mayor. Nearly 70,000 voted for George, who finished second, eclipsing the total of the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, and coming close to defeating Democrat Abram Hewitt. In a political system that within living memory had witnessed the disappearance of the Whig Party, the rise and fall of the K now-Nothings, and the emergence of the Republicans, the events of 1886 suggested that labor might be on the verge of establishing itself as a permanent political force. In fact, 646 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? that year marked the high point of the Knights of Labor. Facing increasing employer hostility and linked by employers and the press to the violence and radicalism associated with the Haymarket events, the Knights soon declined. The major parties, moreover, proved remarkably resourceful in appealing to labor voters. Thus, America’s Gilded Age witnessed deep and sometimes violent divisions over the definition of freedom in a rapidly industrializing society. The battle between upholders of Social Darwinism and laissez-faire, who saw freedom as the right of individuals to pursue their economic interests without outside restraint, and those who believed in collective efforts to create “industrial freedom” for o rdinary Americans, would continue for many decades. In the early twentieth century, reformers would turn to new ways of addressing the social conditions of freedom and new means of increasing ordinary Americans’ political and economic liberty. But before this, in the 1890s, the nation would face its gravest crisis since the Civil War, and the boundaries of freedom would once again be redrawn. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1.The American economy thrived because of federal involvement, not the lack of it. How did the federal government actively promote industrial and agricultural development in this period? 2.Why were railroads so important to America’s second industrial revolution? What events demonstrate their influence on society and politics as well as the economy? 3.Why did organized efforts of farmers, workers, and local reformers largely fail to achieve substantive change in the Gilded Age? 4.Describe the involvement of American family farmers in the global economy after 1870 and its effects on their independence. 5.According to The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, the era’s slogan was “Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.” Explain how this was true of the politics of the era. 6.How did American political leaders seek to remake Indians and change the ways they lived? 7.Explain how social thinkers misapplied Charles Darwin’s ideas to justify massive disparities in wealth and power and to deny government a role in equalizing opportunity. C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 647 8.How did social reformers such as Edward Bellamy, Henry George, and advocates of the social gospel conceive of liberty and freedom differently than the proponents of the liberty of contract ideal and laissez faire? 9.In what ways did the West provide a “safety valve” for the problems in the industrial East? In what ways did it reveal some of the same problems? KEY TERMS trusts (p. 608) Civil Service Act of 1883 (p. 632) vertical integration (p. 609) horizontal expansion (p. 610) Interstate Commerce Commission (p. 633) robber barons (p. 611) Sherman Antitrust Act (p. 633) bonanza farms (p. 616) Social Darwinism (p. 636) Battle of the Little Bighorn (p. 624) liberty of contract (p. 638) Dawes Act (p. 625) Great Railroad Strike (p. 639) Ghost Dance (p. 627) Knights of Labor (p. 640) Wounded Knee massacre (p. 627) single tax (p. 642) the Gilded Age (p. 629) Social Gospel (p. 644) gold standard (p. 632) Haymarket Affair (p. 645) Go to Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. 648 ★ CHAPTER 16 A m er i c a’s G i l ded A ge What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 17 ★ FREEDOM’S BOUNDARIES, AT HOME AND ABROAD 1890–1900 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What were the origins and the significance of Populism? • How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? • In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? • How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? O ne of the most popular songs of 1892 bore the title “Father Was Killed by a Pinkerton Man.” It was inspired by an incident during a bitter strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks at Homestead, Pennsylvania, the nineteenth century’s most widely publicized confrontation between labor and capital. The strike pitted one of the nation’s leading industrial corporations against a powerful union, the Amalgamated Association, which represented the skilled i ron-and steelworkers among the complex’s 3,800 employees. Homestead’s twelve steel mills were the most profitable and technologically advanced in the world. The union contract gave the Amalgamated Association a considerable say in their operation, including the right to approve ★ 649 the hiring of new workers and to regulate the pace of work. To Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, his partner and chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, the union’s power increasingly seemed an intolerable infringement on management’s rights. In 1892, they decided to operate the plant on a nonunion basis. Frick surrounded the factory with a fence topped by barbed wire, constructed barracks to house strikebreakers, and fired the entire workforce. Henceforth, only workers who agreed not to join the union could work at Homestead. In response, the workers, including the unskilled laborers not included in the Amalgamated Association, blockaded the steelworks and mobilized support from the local community. The battle memorialized in song took place on July 6, 1892, when armed strikers confronted 300 private policemen from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Seven workers and three Pinkerton agents were killed, and the Pinkertons were forced to retreat. Four days later, the governor of Pennsylvania dispatched 8,000 militiamen to open the complex on management’s terms. The strikers held out until November, but the union’s defeat was now inevitable. In the end, the Amalgamated Association was destroyed. The Carnegie corporation’s tactics and the workers’ solidarity won the strikers widespread national sympathy. “Ten thousand Carnegie libraries,” declared the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “would not compensate the country for the evils resulting from Homestead.” The strike became an international cause célèbre as well. British newspapers pointed out that their country restricted the use of private police forces far more severely than the United States. Britons, they claimed, understood economic liberty better than Americans. Homestead demonstrated that neither a powerful union nor public opinion could influence the conduct of the largest corporations. The writer Hamlin Garland, who visited Homestead two years after the strike, found the workforce sullen and bitter. He described a town “as squalid and unlovely as could be imagined,” with dingy houses over which hung dense clouds of black smoke. It was “American,” he wrote, “only in the sense in which [it] represents the American idea of business.” In fact, two American ideas of freedom collided at Homestead—the employers’ definition, based on the idea that property rights, unrestrained by union rules or public regulation, sustained the public good, and the workers’ conception, which stressed economic security and independence from what they considered the “tyranny” of employers. The strife at Homestead also reflected broader battles over American freedom during the 1890s. Like the Homestead workers, many Americans came to believe that they were being denied economic independence and democratic s elf-government, long central to the popular understanding of freedom. During the 1890s, millions of farmers joined the Populist movement in an attempt to reverse their declining economic prospects and to rescue the 650 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d What were the origins and the significance of Populism? g overnment from what they saw as control by powerful corporate interests. The 1890s witnessed the imposition of a new racial system in the South that locked A frican- Americans into the status of second-class citizenship, denying them many of the freedoms white Americans took for granted. Increasing immigration produced heated debates over whether the country should reconsider its traditional self-definition as a refuge for foreigners seeking greater freedom on American shores. At the end of the 1890s, in the Spanish- American War, the United States for the first time acquired overseas possessions and found itself ruling over subject peoples from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Was the democratic republic, many Americans wondered, becoming an empire like those of Europe? Rarely has the country experienced at one time so many debates over both the meaning of freedom and freedom’s boundaries. • CHRONOLOGY • 1867 Alaska purchased 1874 Women’s Christian Temperance Union founded 1879– 1880 Kansas Exodus 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act 1883 Civil Rights Cases 1885 Josiah Strong’s Our Country 1886 AFL established 1890 National American Woman Suffrage Association organized 1891 Populist Party organized 1892 Homestead strike 1893 Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani overthrown Economic depression begins 1894 Pullman Strike THE POPULIST CHALLENGE The Farmers’ Revolt Even as labor unrest crested, a different kind of uprising was ripening in the South and the trans-Mississippi West, a response to falling agricultural prices and growing economic dependency in rural areas. Like industrial workers, small farmers faced increasing economic insecurity. In the South, the sharecropping system, discussed in Chapter 15, locked millions of tenant farmers, white and black, into perpetual poverty. The interruption of cotton exports during the Civil War had led to the rapid expansion of production in India, Egypt, and Brazil. The glut of cotton on the world market led to declining prices (from 11 cents a pound in 1881 to 4.6 cents Coxey’s Army marches to Washington Immigration Restriction League established 1895 Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta speech 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson The National Association of Colored Women established 1897 William McKinley inaugurated president 1898Spanish-American War Anti-Imperialist League 1899– 1903 Philippine War 1900 Gold Standard Act 1901– 1904 Insular Cases • TH E PO P U L I S T C H A L L E N G E ★ 651 • in 1894), throwing millions of small farmers deep into debt and threatening them with the loss of their land. In the West, farmers who had mortgaged their property to purchase seed, fertilizer, and equipment faced the prospect of losing their farms when unable to repay their bank loans. Farmers increasingly believed that their plight derived from the high freight rates charged by railroad companies, excessive interest rates for loans from merchants and bankers, and the fiscal policies of the federal government (discussed in the previous chapter) that reduced the supply of money and helped to push down farm prices. Through the Farmers’ Alliance, the largest citizens’ movement of the nineteenth century, farmers sought to remedy their condition. Founded in Texas in the late 1870s, the Alliance spread to forty-three states by 1890. The farmers’ alternatives, said J. D. Fields, a Texas Alliance leader, were “success and freedom, or failure and servitude.” At first, the Alliance remained aloof from politics, attempting to improve rural conditions by the cooperative financing and marketing of crops. Alliance “exchanges” would loan money to farmers and sell their produce. But it soon became clear that farmers on their own could not finance this plan, and banks refused to extend loans to the exchanges. The Alliance therefore proposed that the federal government establish warehouses where farmers could store their crops until they were sold. Using the crops as collateral, the government would then issue loans to farmers at low interest rates, thereby ending their dependence on bankers and merchants. Since it would have to be enacted by Congress, the “subtreasury plan,” as this proposal was called, led the Alliance into politics. The People’s Party In the early 1890s, the Alliance evolved into the People’s Party (or Populists), the era’s greatest political insurgency. The party did not just appeal to farmers. It sought to speak for all the “producing classes” and achieved some of its greatest successes in states like Colorado and Idaho, where it won the support of miners and industrial workers. But its major base lay in the cotton and wheat belts of the South and West. Building on the Farmers’ Alliance network of local institutions, the Populists embarked on a remarkable effort of community organization and education. To spread their message they published numerous pamphlets on political and economic questions, established more than 1,000 local newspapers, and sent traveling speakers throughout rural America. Wearing “a huge black sombrero and a black Prince Albert coat,” Texas Populist orator “Cyclone” Davis traveled the Great Plains accompanied by the writings of Thomas Jefferson, which he quoted to demonstrate the evils of banks and large corporations. 652 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d What were the origins and the significance of Populism? At great gatherings on the western plains, similar in some ways to religious revival meetings, and in small-town southern country stores, one observer wrote, “people commenced to think who had never thought before, and people talked who had seldom spoken. . . . Little by little they commenced to theorize upon their condition.” Here was the last great political expression of the nineteenth-century vision of America as a commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on the ownership of productive property and respect for the dignity of labor. “Day by day,” declared the People’s Party Paper of Georgia in 1893, “the power of the individual sinks. Day by day the power of the classes, or the corporations, rises. . . . In all essential respects, the republic of our fathers is dead.” But although the Populists used the familiar language of n ineteenth- century radicalism, they were hardly a b ackward-looking movement. They embraced the modern technologies that made large-scale cooperative enterprise p ossible—the railroad, the telegraph, and the national market—while looking to the federal government to regulate them in the public interest. They promoted agricultural education and believed farmers should adopt modern scientific methods of cultivation. They believed the federal government could move beyond partisan conflict to operate in a businesslike manner to promote the public g ood—a vision soon to be associated with the Progressive movement and, many years later, politicians like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. The Populist Platform The Populist platform of 1892, adopted at the party’s Omaha convention, remains a classic document of American reform (see the Appendix for the full text). Written by Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota editor and former Radical Republican congressman during Reconstruction, it spoke of a nation “brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” by political corruption and economic inequality. “The fruits of the toil of millions,” the platform declared, “are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes . . . while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty.” The platform put forth a long list of proposals to restore democracy and economic opportunity, many of which would be adopted during the next half-century: the direct election of U.S. senators, government control of the currency, a graduated income tax, a system of low-cost public financing to enable farmers to market their crops, and recognition of the right of workers to form labor unions. In addition, Populists called for public ownership of the railroads to guarantee farmers inexpensive access to markets for their crops. A generation would pass before a major party offered so sweeping a plan for political action to create the social conditions of freedom. TH E PO P U L I S T C H A L L E N G E ★ 653 The Populist Coalition In some southern states, the Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black and white small farmers on a common political and economic program. The obstacles to such an alliance were immense—not merely the heritage of racism and the political legacy of the Civil War, but the fact that many white Populists were landowning farmers while most blacks were tenants and agricultural laborers. Unwelcome in the southern branches of the Farmers’ Alliance, black farmers formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. In 1891, it tried to organize a strike of cotton pickers on plantations in South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. The action was violently suppressed by local authorities and landowners, some of them sympathetic to the white Alliance but unwilling to pay higher wages to their own laborers. In general, southern white Populists’ racial attitudes did not differ significantly from those of their non-Populist neighbors. Nonetheless, recognizing the need for allies to break the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on power in the South, some white Populists insisted that black and white farmers shared common grievances and could unite for common goals. Tom Watson, Georgia’s leading Populist, worked the hardest to forge a black-white alliance. “You are kept apart,” he told interracial audiences, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. . . . This race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.” While many blacks refused to abandon the party of Lincoln, others were attracted by the Populist appeal. In 1894, a coalition of white Populists and black Republicans won control of North Carolina, bringing to the state a “second Reconstruction” complete with increased spending on public education and a revival of black officeholdIn an 1891 cartoon from a Texas Populist newsing. In most of the South, however, paper, northern and southern Civil War veterans Democrats fended off the Populist clasp hands across the “bloody chasm” (a phrase challenge by resorting to the tactics first used by the New York editor Horace Greeley during his campaign for president in 1872). they had used to retain power since the Beneath each figure is an explanation of why 1870s—mobilizing whites with warnvoting alignments have previously been based ings about “Negro supremacy,” intimion s ectionalism—the North fears “rebel” rule, the dating black voters, and stuffing ballot white South “Negro supremacy.” boxes on election day. 654 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d What were the origins and the significance of Populism? POPULIST STRENGTH, 1892 WASHINGTON CANADA MONTANA OREGON IDAHO WYOMING NEVADA CALIFORNIA COLORADO NEW MEXICO TERRITORY Populist share of the presidential vote, 1892 (percentage) MINNESOTA SOUTH DAKOTA WISCONSIN NEW HAMPSHIRE MAINE VERMONT NEW YORK MICHIGAN IOWA PENNSYLVANIA INDIANA OHIO ILLINOIS WEST VIRGINIA KANSAS VIRGINIA MISSOURI KENTUCKY NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE OKLAHOMA SOUTH TERRITORY ARKANSAS CAROLINA NEBRASKA UTAH TERRITORY ARIZONA TERRITORY Over 48 30–48 15–30 5–15 0–5 Not voting NORTH DAKOTA TEXAS MASSACHUSETTS RHODE ISLAND CONNECTICUT NEW JERSEY DELAWARE MARYLAND ALABAMA GEORGIA MISSISSIPPI LOUISIANA FLORIDA MEXICO 0 0 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers The Populist movement also engaged the energies of thousands of r eform- minded women from farm and labor backgrounds. Some, like Mary Elizabeth Lease, a former homesteader and one of the first female lawyers in Kansas, became prominent organizers, campaigners, and strategists. Lease was famous for her speeches urging farmers to “raise less corn and more hell” (although she apparently never actually uttered those exact words, which would have been considered inappropriate for a woman in public). “We fought England for our liberty,” Lease declared, “and put chains on four million blacks. We wiped out slavery and . . . began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first.” During the 1890s, referendums in Colorado and Idaho approved extending the vote to women, while in Kansas and California the proposal went down in defeat. Populists in all these states endorsed women’s suffrage. Populist presidential candidate James Weaver received more than 1 million votes in 1892. The party carried five western states, with t wenty-two electoral votes, and elected three governors and fifteen members of Congress. In his inaugural address in 1893, Lorenzo Lewelling, the new Populist governor of Kansas, anticipated a phrase made famous seventy years later by Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have a dream. . . . In the beautiful vision of a coming time I behold the abolition of poverty. A time is foreshadowed when . . . liberty, equality, and justice shall have permanent abiding places in the republic.” TH E PO P U L I S T C H A L L E N G E ★ 655 The Government and Labor Were the Populists on the verge of replacing one of the two major parties? The severe depression that began in 1893 led to increased conflict between capital and labor and seemed to create an opportunity for expanding the Populist vote. Time and again, employers brought state or federal authority to bear to protect their own economic power or put down threats to public order. Even before the economic downturn, in 1892, the governor of Idaho declared martial law and sent militia units and federal troops into the mining region of Coeur d’Alene to break a strike. In May 1894, the federal government deployed soldiers to disperse Coxey’s Army—a band of several hundred unemployed men led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, who marched to Washington demanding economic relief. Also in 1894, workers in the company-owned town of Pullman, Illinois, where railroad sleeping cars were manufactured, called a strike to protest a reduction in wages. The American Railway Union, whose 150,000 members included both skilled and unskilled railroad laborers, announced that its members would refuse to handle trains with Pullman cars. When the boycott crippled national rail service, President Grover Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney (himself on the board of several railroad companies), obtained a federal court injunction ordering the strikers back to work. Federal troops and U.S. marshals soon occupied railroad centers like Chicago and Sacramento. The strike collapsed when the union’s leaders, including its charismatic president, Eugene V. Debs, were jailed for contempt of court for violating the judicial order. In the case of In re Debs, the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed the sentences and approved the use of injunctions against striking labor unions. On his release from prison in November 1895, more than 100,000 persons greeted Debs at a Chicago railroad depot. Populism and Labor In 1894, Populists made determined efforts to appeal to industrial workers. Populist senators supported the demand of Coxey’s Army for federal unemployment relief, and Governor Davis Waite of Colorado, who had edited a labor newspaper before his election, sent the militia to protect striking miners against company police. In the state and congressional elections of that year, as the economic depression deepened, voters by the millions abandoned the Democratic Party of President Cleveland. In rural areas, the Populist vote increased in 1894. But urban workers did not rally to the Populists, whose core i ssues—the subtreasury plan and lower mortgage interest rates—had little meaning for them and whose demand for higher prices for farm goods would raise the cost of food and reduce the value 656 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d What were the origins and the significance of Populism? of workers’ wages. Moreover, the revivalist atmosphere of many Populist gatherings and the biblical cadences of Populist speeches were alien to the largely immigrant and Catholic industrial working class. Urban working-class voters in 1894 instead shifted en masse to the Republicans, who claimed that raising tariff rates (which Democrats had recently reduced) would restore prosperity by protecting manufacturers and industrial workers from the competition of imported goods and cheap foreign labor. In one of the most decisive shifts in congressional power in American history, the Republicans gained 117 seats in the House of Representatives. Bryan and Free Silver In 1896, Democrats and Populists joined to support William Jennings Bryan for the presidency. A thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska, Bryan won the Democratic nomination after delivering to the national convention an electrifying speech that crystallized the farmers’ pride and grievances. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms,” Bryan proclaimed, “and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” Bryan called for the “free coinage” of s ilver—the unrestricted minting of silver money. In language ringing with biblical imagery, Bryan condemned the gold standard: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” At various points in the nineteenth century, from debates over “hard” versus “soft” money in the Jacksonian era to the greenback movement after the Civil War, the “money question” had played a central role in American politics. Bryan’s demand for “free silver” was the latest expression of the view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would raise the prices farmers received for their crops and make it easier to pay off their debts. His nomination wrested control of the Democratic Party from long-dominant leaders like President Grover Cleveland, who were closely tied to eastern businessmen. There was more to Bryan’s appeal, however, than simply free silver. A devoutly religious man, he was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement (discussed in the previous chapter) and tried to apply the teachings of Jesus Christ to uplifting the “little people” of the United States. He championed a vision of the government helping ordinary Americans that anticipated provisions of the New Deal of the 1930s, including a progressive income tax, banking regulation, and the right of workers to form unions. Many Populists were initially cool to Bryan’s campaign. Their party had been defrauded time and again by Democrats in the South. Veteran Populists feared that their broad program was in danger of being reduced to “free silver.” But realizing that they could not secure victory alone, the party’s leaders TH E PO P U L I S T C H A L L E N G E ★ 657 endorsed Bryan’s candidacy. Bryan broke with tradition and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour, seeking to rally farmers and workers to his cause. The Campaign of 1896 Republicans met the silverite challenge head on, insisting that gold was the only “honest” currency. Abandoning the gold standard, they insisted, would destroy business confidence and prevent recovery from the depression by making creditors unwilling to extend loans, since they could not be certain of the value of the money in which they would be repaid. The party nominated for president Ohio governor William McKinley, who as a congressman in 1890 had shepherded to passage the strongly protectionist McKinley Tariff. The election of 1896 is sometimes called the first modern presidential campaign because of the amount of money spent by the Republicans and the efficiency of their national organization. Eastern bankers and industrialists, thoroughly alarmed by Bryan’s call for monetary inflation and his fiery speeches denouncing corporate arrogance, poured millions of dollars into Republican coffers. (McKinley’s campaign raised some $10 million; Bryan’s around $300,000.) While McKinley remained at his Ohio home, where he addressed crowds of supporters from his front porch, his political manager Mark Hanna created a powerful national machine that flooded the country with pamphlets, posters, and campaign buttons. The results revealed a nation as divided along regional lines as in 1860. Bryan carried the South and West and received 6.5 million votes. McKinley swept the more populous industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest, attracting 7.1 million. The Republican candidate’s electoral margin was even greater: 271 to 176. The era’s bitter labor strife did not carry over into the electoral arena; indeed, party politics seemed to mute class conflict rather than to reinforce it. Industrial America, from financiers and managers to workers, now voted solidly Republican, a loyalty reinforced when prosperity returned after 1897. According to some later critics, the popular children’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published by L. Frank Baum in 1900, offered a commentary on the election of 1896 and its aftermath. In this interpretation, the Emerald City (where everything is colored green, for money) represents Washington, D.C., and the Wizard of Oz, who remains invisible in his palace and rules by illusion, is President McKinley. The only way to get to the city is via a Yellow Brick Road (the color of gold). The Wicked Witches of the East and West represent oppressive industrialists and mine owners. In the much-beloved film version made in the 1930s, Dorothy, the all-American girl from the heartland state of Kansas, wears ruby slippers. But in the book her shoes are silver, supposedly representing the money preferred by ordinary people. 658 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? Whatever Baum’s symbolism, one THE PRESIDENTIAL thing was clear. McKinley’s victory ELECTION OF 1896 shattered the political stalemate that 4 had persisted since 1876 and created 44 6 3 3 4 9 one of the most enduring political 3 15 36 12 4 14 3 4 majorities in American history. During 32 13 6 8 10 3 3 24 15 23 3 McKinley’s presidency, Republicans 6 4 8 12 8 10 17 12 1 11 placed their stamp on economic policy 12 1 9 8 13 by passing the Dingley Tariff of 1897, 9 11 15 8 raising rates to the highest level in his4 Non-voting territory tory, and the Gold Standard Act of 1900. Electoral Vote Popular Vote Not until 1932, in the midst of another Party Candidate (Share) (Share) Republican McKinley 271 (61%) 7,104,779 (51%) economic depression, would the DemDemocrat Bryan 176 (39%) 6,502,925 (47%) ocrats become the nation’s majority Minor parties 315,398 (2%) party. The election of 1896 also proved to be the last presidential election with extremely high voter turnout (in some states, over 90 percent of those eligible). From then on, with the South solidly Democratic and the North overwhelmingly Republican, few states witnessed vigorous t wo-party campaigns. Voter participation began a downhill trend, although it rose again from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. Today, only around half the electorate casts ballots. THE SEGREGATED SOUTH The Redeemers in Power The failure of Populism in the South opened the door for the full imposition of a new racial order. The coalition of merchants, planters, and business entrepreneurs who dominated the region’s politics after 1877, who called themselves Redeemers, had moved to undo as much as possible of Reconstruction. State budgets were slashed, taxes, especially on landed property, reduced, and public facilities like hospitals and asylums closed. Hardest hit were the new public school systems. Louisiana spent so little on education that it became the only state in the Union in which the percentage of whites unable to read and write actually increased between 1880 and 1900. Black schools, however, suffered the most, as the gap between expenditures for black and white pupils widened steadily. “What I want here is Negroes who can make cotton,” declared one planter, “and they don’t need education to help them make cotton.” New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the penalties for petty crimes. “They send [a man] to the penitentiary if he steals a chicken,” complained a former slave in North TH E S E G R E G AT E D S O U T H ★ 659 Carolina. As the South’s prison population rose, the renting out of convicts became a profitable business. Every southern state placed at least a portion of its convicted criminals, the majority of them blacks imprisoned for minor offenses, in the hands of private businessmen. Railroads, mines, and lumber companies competed for this new form of cheap, involuntary labor. Conditions in labor camps were often barbaric, with disease rife and the death rates high. “One dies, get another” was the motto of the system’s architects. The Knights of Labor made convict labor a major issue in the South. In 1892, miners in Tennessee burned the stockade where convict workers were housed and shipped them out of the region. Tennessee abolished the convict lease system three years later but replaced it with a state-owned coal mine using prison labor that reaped handsome profits for decades. The Failure of the New South Dream During the 1880s, Atlanta editor Henry Grady tirelessly promoted the promise of a New South, an era of prosperity based on industrial expansion and agricultural diversification. In fact, while planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Some industry did develop, including mining in the Appalachians, textile production in the Carolinas and Georgia, and furniture and cigarette manufacturing in certain southern cities. The new upcountry cotton factories offered jobs to entire families of poor whites from the surrounding countryside. But since the main attractions for investors were the South’s low wages and taxes and the availability of convict labor, these enterprises made little contribution to regional economic development. With the exception of Birmingham, Alabama, which by 1900 had developed into an important center for the manufacture of iron and steel, southern cities were mainly export centers for cotton, tobacco, and rice, with little industry or skilled labor. Overall, the region remained dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods. In 1900, southern per capita income amounted to only 60 percent of the national average. As late as the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would declare the South the nation’s “number one” economic problem. Black Life in the South As the most disadvantaged rural southerners, black farmers suffered the most from the region’s condition. In the Upper South, economic development offered some o pportunities—mines, iron furnaces, and tobacco factories employed black laborers, and a good number of black farmers managed to acquire land. In the rice kingdom of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, planters found themselves unable to acquire the capital necessary to repair irrigation systems and 660 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? machinery destroyed by the war. By the turn of the century, most of the great plantations had fallen to pieces, and many blacks acquired land and took up self-sufficient farming. In most of the Deep South, however, African-Americans owned a smaller percentage of the land in 1900 than they had at the end of Reconstruction. In southern cities, the network of institutions created after the Civil W ar— schools and colleges, churches, businesses, women’s clubs, and the like—served as the foundation for increasingly diverse black urban communities. They supported the growth of a black middle class, mostly professionals like teachers and physicians, or businessmen like undertakers and shopkeepers serving the needs of black customers. But the labor market was rigidly divided along racial lines. Black men were excluded from supervisory positions in factories and workshops and white-collar jobs such as clerks in offices. A higher percentage of black women than white worked for wages, but mainly as domestic servants. They could not find employment among the growing numbers of secretaries, typists, and department store clerks. The Kansas Exodus Overall, one historian has written, the New South was “a miserable landscape dotted only by a few rich enclaves that cast little or no light upon the poverty surrounding them.” Trapped at the bottom of a stagnant economy, some blacks sought a way out through emigration from the South. In 1879 and 1880, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportunity. The name participants gave to this m igration—the Exodus, derived from the biblical account of the Jews escaping slavery in E gypt—indicated that its roots lay in deep longings for the substance of freedom. Those promoting the Kansas Exodus, including former fugitive slave Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, the organizer of a real estate company, distributed flyers and lithographs picturing Kansas as an idyllic land of rural plenty. Lacking the capital to take up farming, however, most black migrants ended up as unskilled laborers in towns and cities. But few chose to return to the South. In the words of one minister active in the movement, “We had rather suffer and be free.” Despite deteriorating prospects in the South, most A frican-Americans had little alternative but to stay in the region. The real expansion of job opportunities was taking place in northern cities. But most northern employers refused to offer jobs to blacks in the expanding industrial economy, preferring to hire white migrants from rural areas and immigrants from Europe. Not until the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914 cut off immigration did northern employers open industrial jobs to blacks, setting in motion the Great Migration TH E S E G R E G AT E D S O U T H ★ 661 A photograph of townspeople in Nicodemus, a community established by members of the 1879–1880 “Exodus” of southern A frican-Americans to Kansas. discussed in Chapter 19. Until then, the vast majority of African-Americans remained in the South. The Decline of Black Politics Neither black voting nor black officeholding came to an abrupt end in 1877. Blacks continued to cast ballots in large numbers, although Democrats solidified their control of state and local affairs by redrawing district lines and substituting appointive for elective officials in counties with black majorities. A few blacks even served in Congress in the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless, political opportunities became more and more restricted. Not until the 1990s would the number of black legislators in the South approach the level seen during Reconstruction. For black men of talent and ambition, other a venues—business, the law, the c hurch—increasingly seemed to offer greater opportunities for personal advancement and community service than politics. The banner of political leadership passed to black women activists. The National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, brought together local and regional women’s clubs to press for both women’s rights and racial uplift. Most female activists emerged from the small urban black middle class and preached the necessity of 662 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? “respectable” behavior as part and parcel of the struggle for equal rights. They aided poor families, offered lessons in home life and childrearing, and battled gambling and drinking in black communities. Some poor blacks resented middle-class efforts to instruct them in proper behavior. But by insisting on the right of black women to be considered as “respectable” as their white counterparts, the women reformers challenged the racial ideology that consigned all blacks to the status of degraded s econd-class citizens. For nearly a generation after the end of Reconstruction, despite fraud and violence, black southerners continued to cast ballots. In some states, the Republican Party remained competitive. In Virginia, a coalition of mostly black Republicans and a nti-Redeemer Democrats formed an alliance known as the Readjuster movement (the name derived from their plan to scale back, or “readjust,” the state debt). They governed the state between 1879 and 1883. T ennessee and Arkansas also witnessed the formation of biracial political coalitions that challenged Democratic Party rule. Despite the limits of the Populists’ interracial alliance, the threat of a biracial political insurgency frightened the ruling Democrats and contributed greatly to the disenfranchisement movement. The Elimination of Black Voting Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions meant to eliminate the black vote. Since the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the use of race as a qualification for the suffrage, how were such measures even possible? Southern legislatures drafted laws that on paper appeared c olor-blind, but that were actually designed to end black voting. The most popular devices were the poll tax (a fee that each citizen had to pay in order to retain the right to vote), literacy tests, and the requirement that a prospective voter demonstrate to election officials an “understanding” of the state constitution. Six southern states also adopted a grandfather clause, exempting from the new requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the Civil War (when only whites, of course, could cast ballots in the South). The racial intent of the grandfather clause was so clear that the Supreme Court in 1915 invalidated such laws for violating the Fifteenth Amendment. The other methods of limiting black voting, however, remained on the books. Some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good government” measure—a means of purifying politics by ending the fraud, violence, and manipulation of voting returns regularly used against Republicans and Populists. But ultimately, as a Charleston newspaper declared, the aim was to make clear that the white South “does not desire or intend ever to include black men among its citizens.” Although election officials often allowed whites who did not meet the new qualifications to register, numerous poor and illiterate TH E S E G R E G AT E D S O U T H ★ 663 whites also lost the right to vote, a result welcomed by many planters and urban reformers. Louisiana, for example, reduced the number of blacks registered to vote from 130,000 in 1894 to 1,342 a decade later. But 80,000 white voters also lost the right. Disenfranchisement led directly to the rise of a generation of southern “demagogues,” who mobilized white voters by extreme appeals to racism. Tom Watson, who as noted above had tried to forge an interracial Populist coalition in the 1890s, reemerged early in the twentieth century as a power in Georgia public life through vicious speeches whipping up prejudice against blacks, Jews, and Catholics. As late as 1940, only 3 percent of adult black southerners were registered to vote. The elimination of black and many white voters, which reversed the nineteenth-century trend toward more inclusive suffrage, could not have been accomplished without the acquiescence of the North. In 1891, the Senate defeated a proposal for federal protection of black voting rights in the South. Apart from the grandfather clause, the Supreme Court gave its approval to disenfranchisement laws. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any state that deprived male citizens of the franchise was supposed to lose part of its representation in Congress. But like much of the Constitution, this provision was consistently violated so far as African-Americans were concerned. As a result, southern congressmen wielded far greater power on the national scene than their tiny electorates warranted. As for blacks, for decades thereafter, they would regard “the loss of suffrage as being the loss of freedom.” The Law of Segregation Along with disenfranchisement, the 1890s saw the widespread imposition of segregation in the South. Laws and local customs requiring the separation of the races had numerous precedents. They had existed in many parts of the pre–Civil War North. Southern schools and many other institutions had been segregated during Reconstruction. In the 1880s, however, southern race relations remained unsettled. Some railroads, theaters, and hotels admitted blacks and whites on an equal basis while others separated them by race or excluded blacks altogether. In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels, theaters, railroads, and other public facilities. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court insisted, prohibited unequal treatment by state authorities, not private businesses. In 1896, in the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites. The case arose in Louisiana, where the legislature had required railroad companies to maintain a separate car or section for black passengers. A Citizens 664 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? Committee of black residents of New Orleans came together to challenge the law. To create a test case, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned African-American, refused a conductor’s order to move to the “colored only” part of his railroad car and was arrested. To argue the case before the Supreme Court, the Citizens Committee hired Albion W. Tourgée, who as a judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction had waged a courageous battle against the Ku Klux Klan. “Citizenship is national and knows no color,” he insisted, and racial segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. But in a 7-1 decision, the Court upheld the Louisiana law, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate so long as they were “separate but equal.” The lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, reprimanded the majority with an o ft-quoted comment: “Our constitution is color-blind.” Segregation, he insisted, sprang from whites’ conviction that they were the “dominant race” (a phrase used by the Court’s majority), and it violated the principle of equal liberty. To Harlan, freedom for the former slaves meant the right to participate fully and equally in American society. Segregation and White Domination As Harlan predicted, states reacted to the Plessy decision by passing laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of southern life, from schools to hospitals, waiting rooms, toilets, and cemeteries. Some states forbade taxi drivers to carry members of different races at the same time. Despite the “thin disguise” (Harlan’s phrase) of equality required by the Court’s “separate In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws establishing racial segregation did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, so long as facilities were “separate but equal.” In fact, this was almost never the case, as illustrated by these photographs of the elementary schools for black and white children in South Boston, Virginia, in the early twentieth century. TH E S E G R E G AT E D S O U T H ★ 665 but equal” doctrine, facilities for blacks were either nonexistent or markedly inferior. In 1900, no public high school for blacks existed in the entire South. Black elementary schools, one observer reported, occupied buildings “as bad as stables.” More than a form of racial separation, segregation was one part of an all encompassing system of white domination, in which each component— disenfranchisement, unequal economic status, inferior e ducation—reinforced the others. The point was not so much to keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came into contact with each other, whether in politics, labor relations, or social life, whites held the upper hand. For example, many blacks could be found in “whites-only” railroad cars. But they entered as servants and nurses accompanying white passengers, not as paying customers entitled to equal treatment. An elaborate social etiquette developed, with proper behavior differentiated by race. One sociologist who studied the turn-of-the-century South reported that in places of business, blacks had to stand back and wait until whites had been served. They could not raise their voices or in other ways act assertively in the presence of whites, and they had to “give way” on the streets. In shops, whites but not blacks were allowed to try on clothing. Segregation affected other groups as well as blacks. In some parts of Mississippi where Chinese laborers had been brought in to work the fields after the Civil War, three separate school s ystems—white, black, and C hinese—were established. In California, black, Hispanic, and American Indian children were frequently educated alongside whites, but state law required separate schools for those of “mongolian or Chinese descent.” In Texas and California, although Mexicans were legally considered “white,” they found themselves barred from many restaurants, places of entertainment, and other public facilities. The Rise of Lynching Those blacks who sought to challenge the system, or who refused to accept the demeaning behavior that was a daily feature of southern life, faced not only overwhelming political and legal power but also the threat of violent reprisal. In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, the vast majority of them black men, were lynched in the S outh—that is, murdered by a mob. Lynching continued well into the twentieth century. By m id-century, the total number of victims since 1880 had reached nearly 4,000. Some lynchings occurred secretly at night; others were advertised in advance and attracted large crowds of onlookers. Mobs engaged in activities that shocked the civilized world. In 1899, Sam Hose, a plantation laborer who killed his employer in self-defense, was brutally murdered near Newman, Georgia, before 2,000 666 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? A crowd at the aftermath of the lynching of Laura Nelson and her teenage son L. D. Nelson, African-American residents of Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1911. They were accused of shooting to death a deputy sheriff who had come to the Nelson home to investigate the theft of livestock. A week after being lodged in jail, they were removed by a mob and taken to the bridge. Members of the mob raped Mrs. Nelson before the lynching. The photograph was reproduced as a postcard, sold at local stores. As in most lynchings, no one was prosecuted for the crime. onlookers, some of whom arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. A crowd including young children watched as his executioners cut off Hose’s ears, fingers, and genitals, burned him alive, and then fought over pieces of his bones as souvenirs. Law enforcement authorities made no effort to prevent the lynching or to bring those who committed the crime to justice. Like many victims of lynchings, Hose was accused after his death of having raped a white woman. Many white southerners considered preserving the purity of white womanhood a justification for extralegal vengeance. Yet in nearly all cases, as activist Ida B. Wells argued in a newspaper editorial after a Memphis lynching in 1892, the charge of rape was a “bare lie.” Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Wells had become a schoolteacher and editor. Her essay condemning the lynching of three black men in Memphis led a mob to destroy her newspaper, the Memphis Free Press, while she was out of the city. Wells moved to the North, where she became the nation’s leading antilynching crusader. She bluntly insisted that given the conditions of southern blacks, the United States had no right to call itself the “land of the free.” TH E S E G R E G AT E D S O U T H ★ 667 Although many countries have witnessed outbreaks of violence against Lynchings, 1889–1918 minority racial, ethnic, or religious Number of groups, widespread lynching of individState Lynchings uals over so long a period was a phenomGeorgia 386 enon unknown elsewhere. Canada, for example, has experienced only one lynchMississippi 373 ing in its history—in 1884, when a mob Texas 335 from the United States crossed the border Louisiana 313 into British Columbia to lynch an Indian teenager who had fled after being accused Alabama 276 of murder. Arkansas 214 Years later, black writer Blyden Jackson recalled growing up in earlytwentieth-century Louisville, Kentucky, a city in many ways typical of the New South. It was a divided society. There was the world “where white folks lived . . . the Louisville of the downtown hotels, the lower floors of the big movie houses . . . the inner sanctums of offices where I could go only as a humble client or a menial custodian.” Then there was the black world, “the homes, the people, the churches, and the schools,” where “everything was black.” “I knew,” Jackson later recalled, “that there were two Louisvilles and . . . two Americas.” Table 17.1 States with over 200 Politics, Religion, and Memory As the white North and South moved toward reconciliation in the 1880s and 1890s, one cost was the abandonment of the dream of racial equality written into the laws and Constitution during Reconstruction. In popular literature and memoirs by participants, at veterans’ reunions and in public memorials, the Civil War came to be remembered as a tragic family quarrel among white Americans in which blacks had played no significant part. It was a war of “brother against brother” in which both sides fought gallantly for noble causes—local rights on the part of the South, preservation of the Union for the North. Slavery increasingly came to be viewed as a minor issue, not the war’s fundamental cause, and Reconstruction as a regrettable period of “Negro rule” when former slaves had power thrust upon them by a vindictive North. This outlook gave legitimacy to southern efforts to eliminate black voting, lest the region once again suffer the alleged “horrors” of Reconstruction. Southern governments erected monuments to the Lost Cause, a romanticized version of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederate experience. Religion was central to the development of Lost Cause mythology—it offered 668 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? a way for white southerners to come to terms with defeat in the Civil War without abandoning white supremacy. The death of the Confederacy, in many sermons, was equated with the death of Christ, who gave his life for the sins of mankind. Even as white northern Protestants abandoned concern for racial justice and embraced the idea of sectional reconciliation, southern churches played a key role in keeping the values of the Old South alive by refusing to reunite with northern counterparts. In the 1840s, the Methodist and Baptist churches had divided into northern and southern branches. Methodists would not reunite until well into the twentieth century; Baptists have yet to do so. In both North and South, school history textbooks emphasized happy slaves and the evils of Reconstruction, and the role of black soldiers in winning the war was all but forgotten. When a group of black veterans attempted to participate in a Florida ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1911, a white mob tore the military insignias off their jackets and drove them away. R EDR AW ING T HE BOUNDA R IES The effective nullification of the laws and amendments of Reconstruction and the reduction of blacks to the position of second-class citizens reflected nationwide patterns of thought and policy. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, American society seemed to be fracturing along lines of both class and race. The result, commented economist Simon Patten, was a widespread obsession with redrawing the boundary of freedom by identifying and excluding those unworthy of the blessings of liberty. “The South,” he wrote, “has its negro, the city has its slums. . . . The friends of American institutions fear the ignorant immigrant, and the workingman dislikes the Chinese.” As Patten suggested, many Americans embraced a more and more restricted definition of nationhood. The New Immigration and the New Nativism The 1890s witnessed a major shift in the sources of immigration to the United States. Despite the prolonged depression, 3.5 million newcomers entered the United States during the decade, seeking jobs in the industrial centers of the North and Midwest. Over half arrived not from Ireland, England, Germany, and Scandinavia, the traditional sources of immigration, but from southern and eastern Europe, especially Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The new immigrants were widely described by native-born Americans as members of distinct “races,” whose lower level of civilization explained REDRAW I NG T H E B O U N D A R I E S ★ 669 everything from their willingness to work for substandard wages to their supposed inborn tendency toward criminal behavior. They were “beaten men from beaten races,” wrote economist Francis Amasa Walker, representing “the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” American cities, said an Ohio newspaper, were being overrun by foreigners who “have no true appreciation of the meaning of liberty” and therefore posed a danger to democratic government. Founded in 1894 by a group of Boston professionals, the Immigration Restriction League called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States. Such a measure was adopted by Congress early in 1897 but was vetoed by President Cleveland. Like the South, northern and western states experimented with ways to eliminate undesirable voters. Nearly all the states during the 1890s adopted the secret or “Australian” ballot, meant both to protect voters’ privacy and to limit the participation of illiterates (who could no longer receive help from party officials at polling places). Several states ended the n ineteenth-century practice of allowing immigrants to vote before becoming citizens and adopted stringent new residency and literacy requirements. None of these measures approached the scope of black disenfranchisement in the South or the continued denial of voting rights to women. But suffrage throughout the country was increasingly becoming a privilege, not a right. Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights The boundaries of nationhood, expanded so dramatically in the aftermath of the Civil War, slowly contracted. Leaders of both parties expressed vicious opinions regarding immigrants from C hina—they were “odious, abominable, dangerous, revolting,” declared Republican leader James G. Blaine. In 1875, Congress excluded Chinese women from entering the country. California congressman Horace Page, the bill’s author, insisted that it was intended to preserve the health of white citizens by barring Chinese prostitutes. But immigration authorities enforced the Page law so as to keep out as well the wives and daughters of arriving men and of those already in the country. Beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress abrogated the Burlingame Treaty ratified during Reconstruction and temporarily excluded all immigrants from China from entering the country. Although non-whites had long been barred from becoming naturalized citizens, this was the first time that race had been used to exclude an entire group of people. Congress renewed the restriction ten years later and made it permanent in 1902. Chinese in the United States were required to register with the government and carry identification papers or face deportation. Indeed, the use of photographs for personal identification first came into widespread use as a means of enforcing Chinese 670 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? Beginning in 1909, as part of the enforcement of Chinese exclusion, all Chinese in the United States were required to carry a g overnment-issued certificate, the first widespread use of photographs as proof of identity. This certificate, issued in 1924, belonged to Anna May Wong, an American-born movie star. exclusion. One Chinese activist complained that the photos, which bore a striking resemblance to “mug shots” of persons under arrest, criminalized people “innocent of any crime” and created a “national rogues’ gallery” of Chinese residents. In 2012, Congress passed a Resolution of Regret apologizing for the exclusion laws and acknowledging their role in exacerbating racial discrimination. It was sponsored by Judy Chu, a C hinese-American member of the House of Representatives from California. By 1930, because of exclusion, the number of Chinese had declined to 75,000. On the West Coast, the Chinese suffered intense discrimination and periodic mob violence. In the late-nineteenth-century West, thousands of Chinese immigrants were expelled from towns and mining camps, and mobs assaulted Chinese residences and businesses. Chinese fought these measures with methods both illegal and legal. Many refused to carry identification as a protest against what they called the “dog tag” law. Some obtained fraudulent documents that created “paper identities” showing them to be a family member of a U.S. resident, or a member of a group exempted from exclusion, and thus eligible to enter the country. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, some claimed their citizenship papers had been destroyed in the fire that devastated much of the city. Drawing on the legislation of the Reconstruction era, Chinese victims sued local governments for redress when their rights were violated and petitioned Congress for indemnity. Their demands for equal rights forced the state and federal courts to define the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, between 1871 and 1885, San Francisco provided no public education for Chinese children. In 1885, the California Supreme Court, in Tape v. Hurley, ordered REDRAW I NG T H E B O U N D A R I E S ★ 671 the city to admit Chinese students to public schools. The state legislature responded by passing a law authorizing segregated education, and the city established a school for Chinese. But Joseph and Mary Tape, who had lived in the United States since the 1860s, insisted that their daughter be allowed to attend her neighborhood school like other children. “Is it a disgrace to be born a Chinese?” Mary Tape wrote. “Didn’t God make us all!” But her protest failed. Not until 1947 did California repeal the law authorizing separate schools for the Chinese. The U.S. Supreme Court also considered the legal status of ChineseAmericans. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court unanimously ordered San Francisco to grant licenses to Chinese-operated laundries, which the city government had refused to do. To deny a person the opportunity to earn a living, the Court declared, was “intolerable in any country where freedom prevails.” Twelve years later, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment awarded citizenship to children of Chinese immigrants born on American soil. Yet the justices also affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions on immigration. And in its decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Court authorized the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due process of law. In his dissent, Justice David J. Brewer acknowledged that the power was now directed against a people many Americans found “obnoxious.” But “who shall say,” he continued, “it will not be exercised tomorrow against other classes and other people?” Brewer proved to be an accurate prophet. In 1904, the Court cited Fong Yue Ting in upholding a law barring anarchists from entering the United States, demonstrating how restrictions on the rights of one group can become a precedent for infringing on the rights of others. Exclusion profoundly shaped the experience of C hinese-Americans, long stigmatizing them as incapable of assimilation and justifying their isolation from mainstream society. Congress for the first time also barred groups of whites from entering the country, beginning in 1875 with prostitutes and convicted felons, and in 1882 adding “lunatics” and those likely to become a “public charge.” “Are we still a [place of refuge] for the oppressed of all nations?” wondered James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892. The Emergence of Booker T. Washington The social movements that had helped to expand the n ineteenth-century boundaries of freedom now redefined their objectives so that they might be realized within the new economic and intellectual framework. Prominent black leaders, for example, took to emphasizing economic s elf-help and individual advancement into the middle class as an alternative to political agitation. 672 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? Symbolizing the change was the juxtaposition, in 1895, of the death of Frederick Douglass with Booker T. Washington’s widely praised speech, titled the “Atlanta Compromise,” at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition that urged blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights. Born a slave in 1856, Washington had studied as a young man at Hampton Institute, Virginia. He adopted the outlook of Hampton’s founder, General Samuel Armstrong, who emphasized that obtaining farms or skilled jobs was far more important to African-Americans emerging from slavery than the rights of citizenship. Washington put this view into prac- Booker T. Washington, advocate of industrial tice when he became head of Tuskegee education and economic self-help. Institute in Alabama, a center for vocational education (education focused on training for a job rather than broad learning). In his Atlanta speech, Washington repudiated the abolitionist tradition that stressed ceaseless agitation for full equality. He urged blacks not to try to combat segregation: “In all the things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington advised his people to seek the assistance of white employers who, in a land racked by labor turmoil, would prefer a docile, dependable black labor force to unionized whites. Washington’s ascendancy rested in large part on his success in channeling aid from wealthy northern whites to Tuskegee and to black politicians and newspapers who backed his program. But his support in the black community also arose from a widespread sense that in the world of the late nineteenth century, frontal assaults on white power were impossible and that blacks should concentrate on building up their segregated communities. The Rise of the AFL Within the labor movement, the demise of the Knights of Labor and the ascendancy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) during the 1890s reflected a similar shift away from a broadly reformist past to more limited goals. As REDRAW I NG T H E B O U N D A R I E S ★ 673 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Booker T. Washington, Address at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition (1895) In 1895, the year of the death of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington delivered a speech at an exposition in Atlanta advocating a new strategy for racial progress. Blacks, he declared, should remain in the South, turn away from agitation for civil and political rights, adjust to segregation, and seek, with white cooperation, to improve their economic condition. A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” . . . The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. . . . Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. . . . No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. . . . Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities. To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes. . . . In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. . . . The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. 674 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d From W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (1903) The most powerful critique of Washington’s program came from the pen of the black educator and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays on the state of American race relations, he sought to revive the tradition of agitation for basic civil, political, and educational rights. Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. . . . The time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs. . . . This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. . . . The reaction from the sentiment of wartime has given impetus to race prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. . . . The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. . . . [Blacks are] bound to ask of this nation three things. 1. The right to vote. 2. Civic equality. QU E STIONS 3. The education of youth according to ability. . . . 1. What does Washington believe are the Negroes must insist continually, in main routes to black advancement? season and out of season, that voting 2. Why does Du Bois think that Washington’s is necessary to modern manhood, that outlook reflects major elements of social color discrimination is barbarism, and thought in the 1890s? that black boys need education as well as white boys. . . . By every civilized and 3. How do the two men differ in their underpeaceful method we must strive for the standing of what is required for blacks to rights which the world accords to men. enjoy genuine freedom? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 675 the Homestead and Pullman strikes demonstrated, direct confrontations with the large corporations were likely to prove suicidal. Unions, declared Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder and longtime president, should not seek economic independence, pursue the Knights’ utopian dream of creating a “cooperative commonwealth,” or form independent parties with the aim of achieving power in government. Rather, the labor movement should devote itself to negotiating with employers for higher wages and better working conditions for its members. Like Washington, Gompers spoke the language of the era’s business culture. Indeed, the AFL policies he pioneered were known as “business unionism.” Gompers embraced the idea of “freedom of contract,” shrewdly turning it into an argument against interference by judges with workers’ right to organize unions. During the 1890s, union membership rebounded from its decline in the late 1880s. But at the same time, the labor movement became less and less inclusive. Abandoning the Knights’ ideal of labor solidarity, the AFL restricted membership to skilled workers—a small minority of the labor force—effectively excluding the vast majority of unskilled workers and, therefore, nearly all blacks, women, and new European immigrants. AFL membership centered on sectors of the economy like printing and building construction that were dominated by small competitive businesses. AFL unions had little presence in basic industries like steel and rubber, or in the large-scale factories that now dominated the economy. The Women’s Era Changes in the women’s movement reflected the same combination of expanding activities and narrowing boundaries. The 1890s launched what would later be called the “women’s era”—three decades during which women, although still denied the vote, enjoyed larger opportunities than in the past for economic independence and played a greater and greater role in public life. By now, nearly every state had adopted laws giving married women control over their own wages and property and the right to sign separate contracts and make separate wills. Nearly 5 million women worked for wages in 1900. Although most were young, unmarried, and concentrated in traditional jobs such as domestic service and the garment industry, a generation of c ollege-educated women was beginning to take its place in better-paying clerical and professional positions. Through a network of women’s clubs, temperance associations, and social reform organizations, women exerted a growing influence on public affairs. Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) grew to become the era’s largest female organization, with a membership by 1890 of 150,000. Under the banner of Home Protection, it moved from demanding the 676 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? prohibition of alcoholic beverages (blamed for leading men to squander their wages on drink and treat their wives abusively) to a comprehensive program of economic and political reform, including the right to vote. Women, insisted Frances Willard, the group’s president, must abandon the idea that “weakness” and dependence were their nature and join assertively in movements to change society. “A wider freedom is coming to the women of America,” she declared in an 1895 speech to male and female strikers in a Massachusetts shoe factory. “Too long has it been held that woman has no right to enter these movements. So much for the movements. Politics is the place for woman.” At the same time, the center of gravity of feminism shifted toward an outlook more in keeping with prevailing racial and ethnic norms. The earlier “feminism of equal rights,” which claimed the ballot as part of a larger transformation of women’s status, was never fully repudiated. The movement continued to argue for women’s equality in employment, education, and politics. But with increasing frequency, the native-born, middle-class women who dominated the suffrage movement claimed the vote as educated members of a “superior race.” A new generation of suffrage leaders suggested that educational and other voting qualifications did not conflict with the movement’s aims, so long as they applied equally to men and women. Immigrants and former slaves had been enfranchised with “ill-advised haste,” declared Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (created in 1890 to reunite the rival suffrage organizations formed after the Civil War). Indeed, Catt suggested, extending the vote to native-born white women would help to counteract the growing power of the “ignorant foreign vote” in the North and the dangerous potential for a second Reconstruction in the South. Elitism within the movement was reinforced when many advocates of suffrage blamed the “slum vote” for the defeat of a women’s suffrage referendum in California. In 1895, the same year that Booker T. Washington delivered his Atlanta address, the National American Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention in that segregated city. Eight years later, the association met in New Orleans, where the delegates sang “Dixie” and listened to speeches by former Confederate officers that denounced blacks as barbarians. Like other American institutions, the organized movement for women’s suffrage had made its peace with nativism and racism. BECOMING A WORLD POWER The New Imperialism In the last years of the 1890s, the narrowed definition of nationhood was projected abroad, as the United States took its place as an imperial power on the international stage. In world history, the last quarter of the nineteenth century BECO M I N G A W O R L D P O W E R ★ 677 is known as the age of imperialism, when rival European empires carved up large parts of the world among themselves. For most of this period, the United States remained a s econd-rate power. In 1880, the head of the Ottoman empire decided to close three foreign embassies to reduce expenses. He chose those in Sweden, Belgium, and the United States. In that year, the American navy was smaller than Denmark’s or Chile’s. When European powers met at the Berlin Congress of 1884–1885 to divide most of Africa among themselves, the United States attended because of its relationship with Liberia but did not sign the final agreement. Throughout the nineteenth century, large empires dominated much of the globe. After 1870, a “new imperialism” arose, dominated by European powers and Japan. Belgium, Great Britain, and France consolidated their hold on colonies in Africa, and newly unified Germany acquired colonies there as well. The British and Russians sought to increase their influence in Central Asia, and all the European powers struggled to dominate parts of China. By the early twentieth century, most of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific had been divided among these empires. The justification for this expansion of imperial power was that it would bring modern “civilization” to the s upposedly backward peoples of the n on-European world. The natives, according to their colonial occupiers, would be instructed in Western values, labor practices, and the Christian religion. Eventually, they would be accorded the right of self-government, although no one could be sure how long this would take. In the meantime, “empire” was another word for “exploitation.” American Expansionism Territorial expansion, of course, had been a feature of American life from well before independence. But the 1890s marked a major turning point in America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Americans were increasingly aware of themselves as an emerging world power. “We are a great imperial Republic destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world,” proclaimed Henry Watterson, an influential newspaper editor. Until the 1890s, American expansion had taken place on the North American continent. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine (see Chapter 10), to be sure, many Americans had considered the Western Hemisphere an American sphere of influence. There was persistent talk of acquiring Cuba, and President Grant had sought to annex the Dominican Republic, only to see the Senate reject the idea. The last territorial acquisition before the 1890s had been Alaska, p urchased from Russia by Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1867, to much derision from those who could not see the purpose of American 678 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? ownership of “Seward’s icebox.” Seward, however, was mostly interested in the Aleutian Islands, a part of Alaska that stretched much of the way to Asia (see the map on p. 685) and that, he believed, could be the site of coaling stations for merchant ships plying the Pacific. Most Americans who looked overseas were interested in expanded trade, not territorial possessions. The country’s agricultural and industrial production could no longer be entirely absorbed at home. By 1890, companies like Singer Sewing Machines and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company aggressively marketed their products abroad. Especially during economic downturns, business leaders insisted on the necessity of greater access to foreign customers. M iddle-class American women, moreover, were becoming more and more desirous of clothing and food from abroad, and their demand for consumer goods such as “Oriental” fashions and exotic spices for cooking spurred the economic penetration of the Far East. The Lure of Empire One group of Americans who spread the nation’s influence overseas were religious missionaries, thousands of whom ventured abroad in the late nineteenth century to spread Christianity, prepare the world for the second coming of Christ, and uplift the poor. Inspired by Dwight Moody, a Methodist evangelist, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions sent more than 8,000 missionaries to “bring light to heathen worlds” across the globe. Missionary work offered employment to those with few opportunities at home, including blacks and women, who made up a majority of the total. A small group of late-nineteenth-century thinkers actively promoted American expansionism, warning that the country must not allow itself to be shut out of the scramble for empire. In Our Country (1885), Josiah Strong, a prominent Congregationalist clergyman, sought to update the idea of manifest destiny. Having demonstrated their special aptitude for liberty and s elf-government on the North American continent, Strong announced, Anglo-Saxons should now spread their institutions and values to “inferior races” throughout the world. The economy would benefit, he insisted, since one means of civilizing “savages” was to turn them into consumers of American goods. Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large fleet of ships engaged in international trade, protected by a powerful navy operating from overseas bases. Mahan published his book in the same year that the census bureau announced that there was no longer a clear line separating settled from unsettled land. Thus, the frontier no longer existed. “Americans,” wrote Mahan, “must now begin to look outward.” His arguments influenced BECO M I N G A W O R L D P O W E R ★ 679 the outlook of James G. Blaine, who served as secretary of state during Benjamin Harrison’s presidency (1889–1893). Blaine urged the president to try to acquire Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as strategic naval bases. Although independent, Hawaii was already closely tied to the United States through treaties that exempted imports of its sugar from tariff duties and provided for the establishment of an American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Hawaii’s economy was dominated by American-owned sugar plantations that employed a workforce of native islanders and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino laborers under long-term contracts. Early in 1893, a group of American planters organized a rebellion that A cartoon in Puck, December 1, 1897, imagines overthrew the Hawaii government of the annexation of Hawaii by the United States Queen Liliuokalani. On the eve of leavas a shotgun wedding. The minister, President ing office, Harrison submitted a treaty McKinley, reads from a book entitled Annexation of annexation to the Senate. After Policy. The Hawaiian bride appears to be looking determining that a majority of Hawaifor a way to escape. Most Hawaiians did not support annexation. ians did not favor the treaty, Harrison’s successor, Grover Cleveland, withdrew it. In July 1898, in the midst of the Spanish-American War, the United States finally annexed the Hawaiian Islands. In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, a resolution expressing regret to native Hawaiians for “the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii . . . with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States.” The depression that began in 1893 heightened the belief that a more aggressive foreign policy was necessary to stimulate American exports. In the face of social conflict and the new immigration, government and private organizations promoted a unifying patriotism. These were the years when rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” came into existence. Americans had long honored the Stars and Stripes, but the “cult of the flag,” including an official Flag Day, dates to the 1890s. New, mass-circulation newspapers also promoted nationalistic sentiments. By the late 1890s, papers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York W orld—dubbed the “yellow press” by their critics after the 680 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? color in which Hearst printed a popular comic s trip—were selling a million copies each day by mixing sensational accounts of crime and political corruption with aggressive appeals to patriotic sentiments. The “Splendid Little War” All these factors contributed to America’s emergence as a world power in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the immediate origins of the war lay not at home but in the long Cuban struggle for independence from Spain. Ten years of guerrilla war had followed a Cuban revolt in 1868. The movement for independence resumed in 1895. As reports circulated of widespread suffering caused by the Spanish policy of rounding up civilians and moving them into detention camps, the Cuban struggle won growing support in the United States. Demands for intervention escalated after February 15, 1898, when an explosion—probably accidental, a later investigation concluded—destroyed the American battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, with the loss of nearly 270 lives. The yellow press blamed Spain and insisted on retribution. After Spain rejected an American demand for a c ease-fire on the island and eventual Cuban independence, President McKinley in April asked Congress for a declaration of war. The purpose, declared Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, was to aid Cuban patriots in their struggle for “liberty and freedom.” To underscore the government’s humanitarian intentions, Congress adopted the Teller Amendment, stating that the United States had no intention of annexing or dominating the island. Secretary of State John Hay called the Spanish-American conflict a “splendid little war.” It lasted only four months and resulted in fewer than 400 American combat deaths. Having shown little interest in imperial expansion before 1898, McKinley now embraced the idea. The war’s most decisive engagement, in fact, took place not in Cuba but at Manila Bay, a strategic harbor in the Philippine Islands in the distant Pacific Ocean. Here, on May 1, the American navy under Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet. Soon afterward, soldiers went ashore, becoming the first American army units to engage in combat outside the Western Hemisphere. July witnessed another naval victory off Santiago, Cuba, and the landing of American troops on Cuba and Puerto Rico. Roosevelt at San Juan Hill The most highly publicized land battle of the war took place in Cuba. This was the charge up San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. An ardent expansionist, Roosevelt had long believed that a war would reinvigorate the nation’s unity and sense of manhood, which had suffered, he felt, during the 1890s. A few months shy of his fortieth birthday when BECO M I N G A W O R L D P O W E R ★ 681 T H E S PA N I S H -A M E R I C A N WA R : T H E PA C I F I C CHINA UNITED STATES FORMOSA (Taiwan) (Japanese) Hong Kong (British) Pa c i f i c Ocean y we De Hainan T H E S PA N I S H -A M E R I C A N WA R : T H E C A R I B B E A N Lu z o n PHILIPPINE ISLANDS Tampa CUBA Santiago Sulu Sea 400 miles 400 kilometers Manila surrenders August 13, 1898 an 200 200 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Caribbean Sea ta 0 JAMAICA (British) Mindanao Ba 0 PUERTO RICO HAITI SARAWAK (British) NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES Atla n tic Oce a n BAHAMAS Havana South China Sea BRITISH NORTH BORNEO San Juan Hill July 1, 1898 Spanish fleet destroyed July 3, 1898 U.S.S. Maine sunk February 1898 Manila FRENCH INDOCHINA Santiago Co r r e g i d o r Dewey Manila Spanish fleet destroyed May 1, 1898 Pa ci f i c O ce a n 0 0 200 200 400 miles 400 kilometers American victories American forces American naval blockade Spanish forces Spanish possessions In both the Pacific and the Caribbean, the United States achieved swift victories over Spain in the Spanish-American War. war broke out, Roosevelt resigned his post as assistant secretary of the navy to raise a volunteer cavalry unit, which rushed to Cuba to participate in the fighting. Roosevelt envisioned his unit as a cross section of American society and enrolled athletes from Ivy League colleges, western cowboys, representatives of various immigrant groups, and even some American Indians. But with the army still segregated, he excluded blacks from his regiment. Ironically, when the Rough Riders reached the top of San Juan Hill, they found that black units had preceded t hem—a fact Roosevelt omitted in his reports of the battle, which were widely reproduced in the popular press. His exploits made Roosevelt a national hero. He was elected governor of New York that fall and in 1900 became McKinley’s vice president. An American Empire With the backing of the yellow press, the war quickly escalated from a crusade to aid the suffering Cubans to an imperial venture that ended with the United States in possession of a small overseas empire. McKinley became convinced 682 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? that the United States could neither return the Philippines to Spain nor grant them independence, for which he believed the inhabitants unprepared. In an interview with a group of Methodist ministers, the president spoke of receiving a divine revelation that Americans had a duty to “uplift and civilize” the Filipino people and to train them for self-government. In the treaty with Spain that ended the war, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific island of Guam. As for Cuba, before recognizing its independence, McKinley forced the island’s new government to approve the Platt Amendment to the new Cuban constitution (drafted by Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut), which authorized the United States to intervene militarily whenever it saw fit. The United States also acquired a permanent lease on naval stations in Cuba, including what is now the facility at Guantánamo Bay. The Platt Amendment passed the Cuban Congress by a single vote. Cuban patriots were terribly disappointed. José Martí had fomented revolution in Cuba from exile in the United States and then traveled to the island to take part in the uprising, only to be killed in a battle with Spanish soldiers in 1895. “To change masters is not to be free,” Martí had written. And the memory of the betrayal of 1898 would help to inspire another Cuban revolution half a century later. American interest in its new possessions had more to do with trade than gaining wealth from natural resources or large-scale American settlement. Puerto Rico and Cuba were gateways to Latin America, strategic outposts from which American naval and commercial power could be projected throughout the hemisphere. The Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii lay astride shipping routes to the markets of Japan and China. In 1899, soon after the end of the Spanish-American War, Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy, demanding that European powers that had recently divided China into commercial spheres of influence grant equal access to American exports. The Open Door referred to the free movement of goods and money, not people. Even as the United States banned the immigration of Chinese into this country, it insisted on access to the markets and investment opportunities of Asia. The Philippine War Many Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans had welcomed American intervention as a way of breaking Spain’s long hold on these colonies. Large planters looked forward to greater access to American markets, and local elites hoped that the American presence would fend off radical changes proposed by rebellious nationalist movements. Nationalists and labor leaders admired America’s democratic ideals and believed that American participation in the destruction of Spanish rule would lead to social reform and political self-government. But the American determination to exercise continued control, direct or indirect, led to a rapid change in local opinion, nowhere more so than in the BECO M I N G A W O R L D P O W E R ★ 683 Philippines. Filipinos had been fighting a war against Spain since 1896. After Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, established a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of the United States. But once McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Filipino movement turned against the United States. The result was a second war, far longer (it lasted from 1899 to 1903) and bloodier (it cost the lives of more than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans) than the S panish-American conflict. Today, the Philippine War is perhaps the least remembered of all American wars. At the time, however, it was closely followed and widely debated in the United States. Both sides committed atrocities. Insurgents killed Filipinos who cooperated with the Americans. The U.S. Army burned villages and moved the inhabitants into camps where thousands perished of disease, and launched a widespread campaign of torture, including the infamous “water cure” or simulated drowning, later revived in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the 21st century and known as waterboarding. Press reports of these practices tarnished the nation’s self-image as liberators. “We do not intend to free the people of the Philippines,” complained Mark Twain. “We have gone there to conquer.” The McKinley administration justified its policies on the grounds that its aim was to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos (although most residents of the islands were already Roman Catholics). William Howard Taft, who became governor-general of the Philippines in 1901, believed it might take a century to raise Filipinos to the condition where they could appreciate “what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.” Once in control of the Philippines, the colonial administration took seriously the idea of modernizing the islands. It expanded railroads and harbors, brought in American schoolteachers and public health officials, and sought to modernize agriculture (although efforts to persuade local farmers to substitute corn for rice ran afoul of the Filipino climate and cultural traditions). The United States, said President McKinley, had an obligation to its “little brown brothers.” Yet in all the new p ossessions, American policies tended to serve the interests of l and-based local elites—native-born landowners in the Philippines, American sugar planters in Hawaii and Puerto Rico—and such policies bequeathed enduring poverty to the majority of the rural population. Under American rule, Puerto Rico, previously an island of diversified small farmers, became a l ow-wage plantation economy controlled by absentee corporations. By the 1920s, its residents were among the poorest in the entire Caribbean. Citizens or Subjects? American rule also brought with it American racial attitudes. In an 1899 poem, the British writer Rudyard Kipling urged the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” of imperialism. American proponents of empire agreed that the 684 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? AMERICAN EMPIRE, 1898 Alaska (purchased from Russia, 1867) RUSSIAN EMPIRE Bering Strait Aleutian Islands (1867) OUTER MONGOLIA KOREA CHINA CANADA UNITED STATES JAPAN Philippines (ceded by Spain after Spanish-American War, 1898) Midway Islands (annexed 1867) Hawaiian Islands (annexed 1898) Wake Island (annexed 1898) Guam (ceded by Spain after Spanish-American War, 1898) MEXICO A t lan t ic O cean Puerto Rico (ceded by Spain, 1898) Pa ci f i c Ocea n In d ia n Ocean American Samoa (annexed 1899) 0 0 1,000 2,000 miles 1,000 2,000 kilometers United States territory As a result of the S panish-American War, the United States became the ruler of a far-flung overseas empire. domination of n on-white peoples by whites formed part of the progress of civilization. Among the soldiers sent to the Philippines to fight Aguinaldo were a number of black regiments. Their letters from the front suggested that American atrocities arose from white troops applying to the Filipino population the same “treatment for colored peoples” practiced at home. America’s triumphant entry into the ranks of imperial powers sparked an intense debate over the relationship among political democracy, race, and American citizenship. The American system of government had no provision for permanent colonies. The right of every people to s elf-government was one of the main principles of the Declaration of Independence. The idea of an “empire of liberty” assumed that new territories would eventually be admitted as equal states and their residents would be American citizens. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, however, nationalism, democracy, and American freedom emerged more closely identified than ever with notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority. BECO M I N G A W O R L D P O W E R ★ 685 Leaders of both parties, while determined to retain the new overseas possessions, feared that people of what one congressman called “an alien race and foreign tongue” could not be incorporated into the Union. The Foraker Act of 1900 declared Puerto Rico an “insular territory,” different from previous territories in the West. Its 1 million inhabitants were defined as citizens of Puerto Rico, not the United States, and denied a future path to statehood. Filipinos occupied a similar status. In a series of cases decided between 1901 and 1904 and known collectively as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution did not fully apply to the territories recently acquired by the United S tates—a significant limitation of the scope of American freedom. Congress, the Court declared, must recognize the “fundamental” personal rights of residents of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. But otherwise it could govern them as it saw fit for an indefinite period of time. Thus, two principles central to American freedom since the War of Independence—no taxation without representation, and government based on the consent of the governed—were abandoned when it came to the nation’s new possessions. In the twentieth century, the territories acquired in 1898 would follow different paths. Hawaii, which had a sizable population of American missionaries and planters, became a traditional territory. Its population, except for Asian immigrant laborers, became American citizens, and it was admitted as a state in 1959. After nearly a half-century of American rule, the Philippines achieved independence in 1946. Until 1950, the U.S. Navy administered Guam, which remains today an “unincorporated” territory. As for Puerto Rico, it is sometimes called “the world’s oldest colony,” because ever since the Spanish conquered the island in 1493 it has lacked full self-government. Congress extended American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917. Puerto Rico today remains in a kind of political limbo, poised on the brink of statehood or independence. The island has the status of a commonwealth. It elects its own government but lacks a voice in Congress (and in the election of the U.S. president), and key issues such as defense and environmental policy are controlled by the United States. Whatever the end result, the Spanish-American War established a precedent for American intervention in the affairs of other countries, especially those in the Western Hemisphere. In the twentieth century, the United States would intervene in Latin America to change local governments, either by direct military action or via support for military coups, no fewer than forty times. Drawing the Global Color Line Just as American ideas about liberty and self-government had circulated around the world in the Age of Revolution, American racial attitudes had a global impact in the age of empire. The turn of the twentieth century was a 686 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? time of worldwide concern about immigration, race relations, and the “white man’s burden,” all of which inspired a global sense of fraternity among “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Chinese exclusion in the United States strongly influenced anti-Chinese laws adopted in Canada. One “lesson” these countries learned from the United States was that the “failure” of Reconstruction demonstrated the impossibility of multiracial democracy. The extremely hostile account of Reconstruction by the British writer James Bryce in his widely read book The American Commonwealth (published in London in 1888) circulated around the world. Bryce called African-Americans “children of nature” and insisted that giving them the right to vote had been a terrible mistake, which had produced all kinds of corruption and misgovernment. His book was frequently cited by the founders of the Australian Commonwealth (1901) to justify their “white Australia” policy, which barred the further immigration of Asians. The Union of South Africa, inaugurated in 1911, saw its own policy of racial separation—later known as apartheid—as following in the footsteps of segregation in the United States. Even American proposals that did not become law, such as the literacy test for immigrants vetoed by President Cleveland, influenced measures adopted overseas. The United States, too, learned from other countries. The Gentleman’s Agreement that limited Japanese immigration early in the twentieth century (see Chapter 19) followed a similar arrangement between Japan and Canada. “Republic or Empire?” The emergence of the United States as an imperial power sparked intense debate. Opponents formed the Anti-Imperialist League. It united writers and social reformers who believed American energies should be directed at home, businessmen fearful of the cost of maintaining overseas outposts, and racists who did not wish to bring non-white populations into the United States. Among its prominent members were E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, the novelist William Dean Howells, and the labor leader George E. McNeill. The league held meetings throughout the country and published pamphlets called Liberty Tracts, warning that empire was incompatible with democracy. America’s historic mission, the league declared, was to “help the world by an example of successful s elf-government,” not to conquer other peoples. A “republic of free men,” a nti-imperialists proclaimed, should assist the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines in their own “struggles for liberty,” rather than subjecting them to colonial rule. In 1900, Democrats again nominated William Jennings Bryan to run against McKinley. The Democratic platform opposed the Philippine War for placing BECO M I N G A W O R L D P O W E R ★ 687 the United States in the “un-American” position of “crushing with mili tary force” another people’s desire for “liberty and self-government.” George S. Boutwell, president of the Anti-Imperialist League, declared that the most pressing question in the election was the nation’s future character—“republic or empire?” But without any sense of contradiction, proponents of an imperial foreign policy also adopted the language of freedom. Anti-imperialists were the real “infidels to the gospel of liberty,” claimed Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, because America ventured abroad not for material gain or national power, but to bring “a new day of freedom” to the peoples of the world. America’s was a “benevolent” imperialism, An advertisement employs the idea of a White rooted in a national mission to uplift Man’s Burden (borrowed from a poem by Rudbackward cultures and spread liberty yard Kipling) as a way of promoting the virtues across the globe. Beveridge did not, howof Pears’ Soap. Accompanying text claims that Pears’ is “the ideal toilet soap” for “the cultured ever, neglect more practical considof all nations,” and an agent of civilization in “the erations. American trade, he insisted, dark corners of the earth.” “henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer.” And the Philippines held the key to “the commercial situation of the entire East.” Riding the wave of patriotic sentiment inspired by the war, and with the economy having recovered from the depression of 1893–1897, McKinley in 1900 repeated his 1896 triumph. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to take its place among the world’s great powers. Writers at home and overseas confidently predicted that American influence would soon span the globe. In his 1902 book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, a grandson of John Quincy Adams, predicted that because of its economic power, the United States would soon “outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.” Years would pass before this prediction was fulfilled. But in 1900, many features that would mark American life for much of the twentieth century were already apparent. The United States led the world in industrial production. 688 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? The merger movement of 1897–1904 (discussed in the previous chapter) left broad sections of the economy under the control of giant corporations. The political system had stabilized. The white North and South had achieved reconciliation, while rigid lines of racial exclusion—the segregation of blacks, Chinese exclusion, Indian reservations—limited the boundaries of freedom and citizenship. Yet the questions central to n ineteenth-century debates over f reedom—the relationship between political and economic liberty, the role of government in creating the conditions of freedom, and the definition of those entitled to enjoy the rights of c itizens—had not been permanently answered. Nor had the dilemma of how to reconcile America’s role as an empire with traditional ideas of freedom been resolved. These were the challenges bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the first generation of the twentieth. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1.What economic and political issues gave rise to the Populist Party, and what changes did the party advocate? 2.How did employers use state and federal forces to protect their own economic interests, and what were the results? 3.Compare and contrast the goals, strategies, and membership of the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor (you may want to refer back to Chapter 16). 4.Who were the Redeemers, and how did they change society and politics in the New South? 5.Explain how changes in the politics, economics, social factors, and spread of violence affected the situation of blacks in the New South. 6.How did religion and the idea of the Lost Cause give support to a new understanding of the Civil War? 7.What ideas and interests motivated the United States to create an empire in the late nineteenth century? 8.Compare the arguments for and against U.S. imperialism. Be sure to consider the views of Josiah Strong and Emilio Aguinaldo. 9.What rights did Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans gain in these years, and what limitations did they experience? How did their experiences set the stage for other restrictions on immigration? C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 689 KEY TERMS Populists (p. 652) Chinese Exclusion Act (p. 670) Coxey’s Army (p. 656) Atlanta Compromise (p. 673) New South (p. 660) Kansas Exodus (p. 661) American Federation of Labor (p. 673) grandfather clause (p. 663) yellow press (p. 680) disenfranchisement (p. 663) U.S.S. Maine (p. 681) Plessy v. Ferguson (p. 664) Platt Amendment (p. 683) “separate but equal” (p. 665) Open Door Policy (p. 683) lynching (p. 666) Philippine War (p. 684) Lost Cause (p. 668) Insular Cases (p. 686) new immigrants (p. 669) Anti-Imperialist League (p. 687) Immigration Restriction League (p. 670) Go to Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. 690 ★ CHAPTER 17 Fr eedom ’s Boundar i es , a t H o me a n d A b ro a d What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 18 ★ THE PROGRESSIVE ERA 1900–1916 FOCUS QUESTIONS • Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America? • How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? • In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? • How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state? I t was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three floors of a ten- story building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’ blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owners’ way, it was later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fire department rushed to the scene with h igh-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only to the sixth floor. As the fire raged, onlookers watched in horror as girls leapt from the upper stories. By the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found inside the building. ★ 691 The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was typical of manufacturing in the nation’s largest city, a beehive of industrial production in small, crowded factories. New York was home to 30,000 manufacturing establishments with more than 600,000 employees—more industrial workers than in the entire state of Massachusetts. Triangle had already played a key role in the era’s labor history. When 200 of its workers tried to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the owners responded by firing them. This incident helped to spark a general walkout of female garment workers in 1909—the Uprising of the 20,000. Among the strikers’ demands was better safety in clothing factories. The impoverished immigrants forged an alliance with middle-and upper-class female supporters, including members of the Women’s Trade Union League, which had been founded in 1903 to help bring women workers into unions. Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of railroad magnate William Vanderbilt, contributed several of her cars to a parade in support of the striking workers. By the time the walkout ended early in 1911, the ILGWU had won union contracts with more than 300 firms. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not among them. The Triangle fire was not the worst fire disaster in American history (seven years earlier, over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. More than twenty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would refer to it in a press conference as an example of why the government needed to regulate industry. In its wake, efforts to organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory inspection laws and fire safety codes. Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era. These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded rapidly—by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in combating it. The fire and its aftermath also highlighted how traditional gender roles were changing as women took on new responsibilities in the workplace and in the making of public policy. The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a broad, loosely defined political movement of individuals and groups who hoped to bring about significant change in American social and political life. Progressives included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers. Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organizations who 692 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big business. Everywhere in early-twentieth-century America the signs of economic and political consolidation were a pparent—in the power of a small directorate of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, the manipulation of democracy by corrupt political machines, and the rise of new systems of managerial control in workplaces. In these circumstances, wrote Benjamin P. DeWitt, in his 1915 book The Progressive Movement, “the individual could not hope to compete. . . . Slowly, Americans realized that they were not free.” As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reformers responded to the perception of declining freedom in varied, contradictory ways. The era saw the expansion of political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman suffrage, the use of political power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary citizens more influence on legislation. It witnessed the flowering of understandings of freedom based on individual fulfillment and personal self-determination—the ability to participate fully in the e ver-expanding consumer marketplace and, especially for women, to enjoy economic and sexual freedoms long considered the province of men. At the same time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those deemed fit to exercise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the 1890s became fully consolidated in • CHRONOLOGY • 1889 Hull House founded 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics 1901 Socialist Party founded in United States President McKinley assassinated 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt assists in coal strike 1903 Women’s Trade Union League founded Ford Motor Company established 1904 Northern Securities dissolved 1905 Industrial Workers of the World established 1906 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Meat Inspection Act Pure Food and Drug Act Hepburn Act 1908 Muller v. Oregon 1909 Uprising of the 20,000 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire Society of American Indians founded 1912 Children’s Bureau established Theodore Roosevelt organizes the Progressive Party 1913 Sixteenth Amendment Seventeenth Amendment THE P R O G R E S S I V E E R A ★ 693 Federal Reserve established 1914 Ludlow Massacre Federal Trade Commission established Clayton Act • • the South. Growing n umbers of n ative-born Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully “Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political decision making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate. The idea of freedom remained as contested as ever in Progressive America. AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY Farms and Cities The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the continued expansion of the consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total output rose by about 85 percent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. As farm prices recovered from their low point during the depression of the 1890s, American agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its “golden age.” The expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for farm goods. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 million claims for free government land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than in the previous forty years combined. Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma rose by nearly 2 million people, and Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas added 800,000. Irrigation transformed the Imperial Valley of California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming. But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass-consumer society. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them New York, with 4.7 million residents. The t wenty-three square miles of Manhattan Island were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty-three of the states. Fully a quarter of them inhabited the Lower East Side, an immigrant neighborhood more densely populated than Bombay or Calcutta in India. The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant families in New York’s downtown tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets. Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row. According to one estimate, J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all financial and 694 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America? industrial capital in the United States. Alongside such wealth, reported the Commission on Industrial Relations, established by Congress in 1912, more than one-third of the country’s mining and manufacturing workers lived in “actual poverty.” The city captured the imagination of artists, writers, and reformers. The glories of the American landscape had been the focal point of nineteenth-century painters (exemplified by the Hudson River school, A colored photograph from around 1900 shows which produced canvases celebrat- the teeming street life of Mulberry Street, on ing the wonders of nature). The New York City’s densely populated Lower East city and its daily life now became Side. The massive immigration of the early twentheir preoccupation. Painters like tieth century transformed the life of urban centers throughout the country and helped to spark the George W. Bellows and John Sloan Progressive movement. and photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen captured the electric lights, crowded bars and theaters, and soaring skyscrapers of the urban landscape. With its youthful, exuberant energies, the city seemed an expression of modernity itself. The Muckrakers Others saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent social inequality. A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens (published as a series in McClure’s Magazine in 1901–1902 and in book form in 1904) showed how party bosses and business leaders profited from political corruption. McClure’s also hired Ida Tarbell to expose the arrogance and economic machinations of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Published in two volumes in 1904, her History of the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of what Theodore Roosevelt disparaged as muckraking—the use of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life. Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traced a young woman’s moral A N URBA N A G E A N D A C O N S U ME R S O C I E T Y ★ 695 corruption in Chicago’s harsh urban environment. Perhaps the era’s most influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Immigration as a Global Process If one thing characterized earlytwentieth-century cities, it was their immigrant character. The “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between A photograph by Lewis Hine, who used his cam1901 and the outbreak of World War I era to chronicle the plight of child laborers shown in Europe in 1914, some 13 million here: a young spinner in a Vermont cotton factory. immigrants came to the United States, the majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive-era immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agriculture. Poles emigrated not only to Pittsburgh and Chicago but to work in German factories and Scottish mines. Italians sought jobs in Belgium, France, and Argentina as well as the United States. As many as 750,000 Chinese migrated to other countries each year. During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be virtually cut off, first by the outbreak of World War I and then by legislation), perhaps 40 million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. This population flow formed one part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout the world. Numerous causes inspired this uprooting of population. Rural southern and eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining economies. Political turmoil at home, like the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration. Not all of these immigrants could be classified as “free 696 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America? laborers,” however. Large numbers of Chinese, M exican, and Italian migrants, including many who came to the United States, were bound to long-term labor contracts. These contracts were signed with labor agents, who then provided the workers to American employers. But all the areas attracting immigrants were frontiers of one kind or a nother—agricultural, mining, or industrial— with expanding job opportunities. Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in New York harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to an immigrant who passed through Ellis Island. The less fortunate, who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes, or in other ways undesirable, were sent home. At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the West. After the exclusion of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century, a small number of Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in California’s fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. By 1910, the population of Japanese origin had grown to 72,000. Between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia. Far larger was Mexican immigration. Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that country’s population) entered the United States— a number exceeded by only a few European countries. Mexicans generally entered through El Paso, Texas, the main southern gateway into the United States. Many ended up in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where citrus growers searching for cheap labor had earlier experimented with Native American, South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino migrant workers. By 1910, o ne-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest percentage in the counAn illustration in the 1912 publication The New try’s history. More than 40 percent of Immigration depicts the various “types” entering New York City’s population had been the United States. born abroad. In Chicago and smaller A N URBA N A G E A N D A C O N S U ME R S O C I E T Y ★ 697 Table 18.1 Immigrants and Their Children as Percentage of Population, Ten Major Cities, 1920 City Percentage New York City 76% Cleveland 72 Boston 72 Chicago 71 Detroit 65 industrial cities like Providence, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the figure exceeded 30 percent. Although many newcomers moved west to take part in the expansion of farming, most clustered in industrial centers. By 1910, nearly three- fifths of the workers in the twenty leading manufacturing and mining industries were foreign-born. The Immigrant Quest for Freedom Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived Minneapolis 63 imagining the United States as a land Pittsburgh 59 of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law, could worship Seattle 55 as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emanciLos Angeles 45 pated from the oppressive social hierarchies of their homelands. “America is a free country,” one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale immigration reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom and prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Freedom, they added, was largely an economic ambition—a desire to escape from “hopeless poverty” and achieve a standard of living impossible at home. While some of the new immigrants, especially Jews fleeing religious persecution in the Russian empire, thought of themselves as permanent emigrants, the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land. Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only temporarily in the United States. In 1908, a year of economic downturn in the United States, more Italians left the country than entered. The new immigrants clustered in close- knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops, theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues. As early as 1900, more than 1,000 foreign-language newspapers were published in the United States. Churches were pillars of these immigrant communities. In New York’s East Harlem, even anti-clerical Italian immigrants, who resented the close alliance in Italy San Francisco 64 698 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America? between the Catholic Church and the oppressive state, participated eagerly in the annual festival of the Madonna of Mt. Carmel. After I talian-Americans scattered to the suburbs, they continued to return each year to reenact the festival. Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impoverished regions from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, while native-born workers dominated skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.” Consumer Freedom Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a m ass-consumption society that added new meaning to American freedom. There was, of course, nothing unusual in the idea that the promise of American life lay, in part, in the enjoyment by the masses of citizens of goods available in other countries only to the well-to-do. Not until the Progressive era, however, did the advent of large downtown department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail m ail- order houses for farmers and s mall-town residents make available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players. Low wages, the unequal distribution of income, and the South’s persistent poverty limited the consumer economy, which would not fully come into its own until after World War II. But it was in Progressive America that the promise of mass consumption became the foundation for a new understanding of freedom as access to the cornucopia of goods made available by modern capitalism. Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption. Amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. The most popular form of mass entertainment at the turn of the century was vaudeville, a live theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous short acts typically including song and dance, comedy, acrobats, magicians, and trained animals. In the 1890s, brief motion pictures were already being introduced into vaudeville shows. As the movies became longer and involved more sophisticated plot narratives, separate theaters developed. By 1910, 25 million Americans per week, mostly w orking-class urban residents, were attending “nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose five-cent admission charge was far lower than at vaudeville shows. A N URBA N A G E A N D A C O N S U ME R S O C I E T Y ★ 699 The Working Woman Table 18.2 Percentage of Women The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places of entertainment like Occupation 1900 1920 cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles were Professional, 8.2% 11.7% technical changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fire revealed, Clerical 4.0 18.7 more and more women were working Sales workers 4.3 6.2 for wages. Black women still worked Unskilled and primarily as domestics or in southern semiskilled cotton fields. Immigrant women were manufacturing 23.7 20.2 largely confined to low-paying factory Household 28.7 15.7 employment. But for n ative-born white workers women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enormously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were office workers or telephone operators, and only 15 percent worked in domestic service, the largest female job category of the nineteenth century. Female work was no longer confined to young, unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands. The working woman—immigrant and native, working-class and professional—became a symbol of female emancipation. Women faced special limitations on their economic freedom, including wage discrimination and exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves, union leader Abraham Bisno remarked, young immigrant working women developed a sense of independence: “They acquired the right to a personality,” something alien to the highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New York. The growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career, wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her influential book Women and Economics (1898), offered evidence of a “spirit of personal independence” that pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gilman’s writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman’s freedom lay through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not fulfillment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite, little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of the word. Workers in Various Occupations, 1900–1920 700 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America? The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remarkably similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously “free” children, especially daughters. Contemporaries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of fashion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as o ld-fashioned and not sufficiently “American.” Immigrant parents found it very difficult to adapt to what one Mexican mother called “this terrible freedom in this United States.” “The Mexican girls,” she told a sociologist studying immigrant life in Los Angeles, “seeing American girls with freedom, they want it too.” The Rise of Fordism If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. The son of an immigrant Irish farmer, Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shops and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, The assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan, around 1914. A N URBA N A G E A N D A C O N S U ME R S O C I E T Y ★ 701 he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models like the Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsmanship, Ford concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices. In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised wages at his factory to the unheard of level of five dollars per day (more than double the pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers. Labor conditions in the Ford plant were not as appealing as the wages, however: assembly-line work was monotonous (the worker repeated the same basic motions for the entire day), and Ford used spies and armed detectives to prevent unionization. When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profits by paying high wages, Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000 Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well within the reach of many workers) in 1916. The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism. The Promise of Abundance As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equipment, etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty as a sales device. The d epartment-store magnate Edward Filene called consumerism a “school of freedom,” since shoppers made individual choices on basic questions of living. Economic abundance would eventually come to define the “American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through acquiring material goods. The promise of abundance shifted the quest for freedom to the realm of private life, but it also inspired political activism. Exclusion from the world of mass consumption would come to seem almost as great a denial of the rights of citizenship as being barred from voting once had been. The desire for consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fight for higher wages. The argument that monopolistic corporations artificially raised prices at the expense of consumers became a weapon against the trusts. “Consumers’ consciousness,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who emerged in these years as one of the nation’s most influential social commentators, was growing rapidly, with the “high cost of living” as its rallying cry. 702 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? An American Standard of Living The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to c oncepts—a “living wage” and an “American standard of living”—that offered a new language for criticizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan’s influential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a “natural and absolute” right of citizenship. Ryan had grown up in Minnesota in a family sympathetic to Henry George, the Knights of Labor, and the Populists. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s powerful statement of 1894, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good s ociety. Ryan’s insistence that economic relationships should be governed by moral standards had a powerful influence on social thought among American Catholics. The popularity of the idea of an American standard of living reflected, in part, the emergence of a m ass-consumption society during the Progressive era. For the first time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a central place in descriptions of American society and its future. In the Gilded Age, social theorists like Henry George had wondered why economic progress produced both increased wealth and abject misery. The Progressive generation was strongly influenced by the more optimistic writings of Simon W. Patten, a prophet of prosperity. Patten announced the end of the “reign of want” and the advent of a society of abundance and leisure. In the dawning “new civilization,” he proclaimed, Americans would enjoy economic equality in a world in which “every one is independent and free.” VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM For most Americans, however, Patten’s “new civilization” lay far in the future. The more immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize industrial capitalism and find common ground in a society still racked by labor conflict and experiencing massive immigration from abroad. Some Progressives proposed to return to a competitive marketplace populated by small producers. Others accepted the permanence of the large corporation and looked to the government to reverse the growing concentration of wealth and to ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the economic and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfillment and unimpeded self-expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused VA RI ETI ES O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 703 with new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early twentieth century. The “old democracy,” wrote Walter Weyl, associate editor of The New Republic, a weekly magazine that became the “bible” of Progressive intellectuals, provided no answer to the problems of a world in which the “chief restrictions upon liberty” were economic, not political. Industrial Freedom In Progressive America, complaints of a loss of freedom came not only from the most poorly paid factory workers but from b etter-off employees as well. Large firms in the automobile, electrical, steel, and other industries sought to implement greater control over the work process. Efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor pioneered what he called scientific management—a program that sought to streamline production and boost profits by systematically controlling costs and work practices. Through scientific study, the “one best way” of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to obey the detailed instructions of supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw the erosion of their traditional influence over the work process as a loss of freedom. “Men and women,” complained Samuel Gompers, whose American Federation of Labor (AFL) represented such skilled workers, “cannot live during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates.” The great increase in the number of white-collar workers—the army of salespeople, bookkeepers, salaried professionals, and corporate managers that sprang up with the new system of m anagement—also undermined the experience of personal autonomy. For although they enjoyed far higher social status and incomes than manual workers, many, wrote one commentator, were the kind of individuals who “under former conditions, would have been . . . managing their own businesses,” not working for someone else. These developments helped to place the ideas of “industrial freedom” and “industrial democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary in the Gilded Age, at the center of political discussion during the Progressive era. Lack of “industrial freedom” was widely believed to lie at the root of the much- discussed “labor problem.” Since in an industrial age the prospect of managing one’s own business seemed increasingly remote, many Progressives believed that the key to increasing industrial freedom lay in empowering workers to participate in economic decision making via strong unions. Louis D. Brandeis, an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, maintained that unions embodied an essential principle of freedom—the right of people to govern themselves. The contradiction between “political liberty” and “industrial slavery,” Brandeis insisted, was America’s foremost social problem. Workers deserved a voice not only in 704 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? establishing wages and working conditions but also in making such managerial decisions as the relocation of factories, layoffs, and the distribution of profits. The Socialist Presence Economic freedom was also a rallying cry of American socialism, which reached its greatest influence during the Progressive era. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party brought together surviving late-nineteenth-century radicals such as Populists and followers of Edward Bellamy, with a portion of the labor movement. The party called for immediate reforms such as free college education, legislation to improve the condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and factories. It was the task of socialism, said western labor leader John O’Neill, to “gather together the shards of liberty”—the fragments of the American heritage of freedom—scattered by a government controlled by capitalist millionaires. By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 150,000 d ues-paying members, published hundreds of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American SOCIALIST TOWNS AND CITIES, 1900–1920 Burlington Edmonds Tukwila Hillyard Coeur d'Alene Beatrice Camas WA Missoula (2 Commissioners) Butte Coquille Minden MT Rugby CANADA Hilaire Duluth Crookston St.Tenstrike ME Minot (Commissioner) (Commissioner) Laporte Cloquet ND Pillager Brainerd Barre Harbor Springs OR Sisseton Eagle Bend WI Traverse City Gustin VT NH ID Minneapolis Dawson Schenectady MN Manitowoc S. Frankfort MA SD Eureka Buffalo NY Wilson W Salem Sheboygan Naugatuck WY Milwaukee West Allis Haledon MI IA Davis Murray Rockaway CT PA Davenport Torino Stockton Eureka NE Madrid Phelps Silvis NV Mammoth Berkeley NJ Longmont IN Canton OH UT MD Daly City Nederland Lafayette Red Cloud Wymore Riverton Lincoln Clinton DE Edgewater Grand Junction Thayer IL MOGrafton Hymera WV Jerseyville Buena Vista KS Victor CA Cedar City Granite City O'Fallon VA Hillsboro Arma Mascoutah CO Brookneal Curranville Liberal Buckner Dorrisville KY Girard Buffalo AZ NM Watts Frontenac Mindenmines Gibson NC Cardwell TN Lackawanna OK Hartford Winslow Greenville Flint Chant SC NY Osnaburg Antlers GA AL AR Amsterdam Ashtabula MI Birmingham Conneaut MS Union City Roulette (Commissioner) Kalamazoo Mineral Ridge Winnfield Wheatland PA Williamsport Cleveland (Commissioner) TX Lorain Salem New Castle McKeesport Hazeldell LA FL Shelby Massillon (Controller) Fostoria Mineral City Pitcairn Broad Jenera St. Mary's Toronto Canal Dover Top Twp. Gulfport Mt. Vernon Martins Ferry Garrett Gas City Lima Linden Lake Worth Byesville Star City Heights Barnhill Elwood Sugar Grove Piqua Hendricks Coshocton Adamston Hamilton IN OH KY WV Miami Des Lacs VA 0 0 250 250 RI 500 miles 500 kilometers Socialist mayor Major municipal officer other than mayor Although the Socialist Party never won more than 6 percent of the vote nationally, it gained control of numerous small and medium-sized cities between 1900 and 1920. VA RI ETI ES O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 705 Federation of Labor, and had elected scores of local officials. Socialism flourished in diverse communities throughout the country. On the Lower East Side of New York City, it arose from the economic exploitation of immigrant workers and Judaism’s tradition of social reform. Here, a vibrant socialist culture developed, complete with Yiddish-language newspapers and theaters, as well as large public meetings and street demonstrations. In 1914, the district elected socialist Meyer London to Congress. Another center of socialist strength was Milwaukee, where Victor Berger, a German-born teacher and newspaper editor, mobilized local AFL unions into a potent political force that elected Emil Seidel mayor in 1910. Seidel’s administration provided aid to the unemployed, forced the police to recognize the rights of strikers, and won the respect of middle-class residents for its honesty and freedom from machine domination. Socialism also made inroads among tenant farmers in old Populist areas like Oklahoma, and in the mining regions of Idaho and Montana. The Gospel of Debs No one was more important in spreading the socialist gospel or linking it to ideals of equality, self-government, and freedom than Eugene V. Debs, the railroad union leader who, as noted in the previous chapter, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894. For two decades, Debs criss-crossed the country preaching that control of the economy by a democratic government held out the hope of uniting “political equality and economic freedom.” As a champion of the downtrodden, Debs managed to bridge the cultural divide between New York’s Jewish immigrants, prairie socialists of the West, and native-born intellectuals attracted to the socialist ideal. “While there is a lower class,” proclaimed Debs, “I am in it. . . . While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Throughout the Atlantic world of the early twentieth century, socialism was a rising presence. Debs would receive more than 900,000 votes for president (6 percent of the total) in 1912. In that year, the socialist Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, with a circulation of 700,000, was the largest weekly newspaper in the country, and socialist Max Hayes polled o ne-third of the vote when he challenged Samuel Gompers for the presidency of the AFL. In western Europe, socialism experienced even more pronounced growth. In the last elections before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, socialists in France, Germany, and Scandinavia won between o ne-sixth and one-third of the vote. “Socialism is coming,” declared the Appeal to Reason. “It is coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it.” AFL and IWW Socialism was only one example of widespread discontent in Progressive America. The labor strife of the Gilded Age continued into the early twentieth 706 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? century. Having survived the depression of the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor saw its membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the same time, it sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. AFL president Gompers joined with George Perkins of the J. P. Morgan financial empire and Mark Hanna, who had engineered McKinley’s election in 1896, in the National Civic Federation, which accepted the right of collective bargaining for “responsible” unions. It helped to settle hundreds of industrial disputes and encouraged improvements in factory safety and the establishment of pension plans for long-term workers. Most employers nonetheless continued to view unions as an intolerable interference with their authority, and resisted them stubbornly. The AFL mainly represented the most privileged American workers— skilled industrial and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and n ative- born. In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusionary policies formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Part trade union, part advocate of a workers’ revolution that would seize the means of production and abolish the state, the IWW made solidarity its guiding principle, extending “a fraternal hand to every wage-worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade.” The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL— the immigrant factory-labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks, and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast. The IWW’s most prominent leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, who had worked in western mines as a youth. Dubbed by critics “the most dangerous man in America,” Haywood became a national figure in 1906 when he was kidnapped and spirited off to Idaho, accused of instigating the murder of a former a nti-union governor. Defended by labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, Haywood was found not guilty. The New Immigrants on Strike The Uprising of the 20,000 in New York’s garment industry, mentioned earlier, was one of a series of mass strikes among immigrant workers that placed labor’s demand for the right to bargain collectively at the forefront of the reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that while ethnic divisions among workers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis of unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis. IWW organizers printed leaflets, posters, and banners in multiple languages and insisted that each nationality enjoy representation on the committee coordinating a walkout. It drew on the sense of solidarity within immigrant communities to persuade local religious leaders, shopkeepers, and officeholders to support the strikes. VA RI ETI ES O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 707 The labor conflict that had the greatest impact on public consciousness took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city’s huge woolen mills employed 32,000 men, women, and children representing twenty-five nationalities. They worked six days per week and earned an average of sixteen cents per hour. When the state legislature in January 1912 enacted a fifty-four-hour limit to the workweek, employers reduced the weekly take-home pay of those who Striking New York City garment workers carrying had been laboring longer hours. Worksigns in multiple languages, 1913. ers spontaneously went on strike, and called on the IWW for assistance. In February, Haywood and a group of women strikers devised the idea of sending strikers’ children out of the city for the duration of the walkout. Socialist families in New York City agreed to take them in. The sight of the children, many of whom appeared pale and h alf-starved, marching up Fifth Avenue from the train station led to a wave of sympathy for the strikers. “I have worked in the slums of New York,” wrote one observer, “but I have never found children who were so uniformly ill-nourished, ill-fed, and i ll-clothed.” A few days later, city officials ordered that no more youngsters could leave Lawrence. When a group of mothers and children gathered at the railroad station in defiance of the order, c lub-wielding police drove them away, producing outraged headlines around the world. The governor of Massachusetts soon intervened, and the strike was settled on the workers’ terms. A banner carried by the Lawrence strikers gave a new slogan to the labor movement: “We want bread and roses, too”—a declaration that workers sought not only higher wages but the opportunity to enjoy the finer things of life. Another highly publicized labor uprising took place in New Orleans, where a 1907 strike of 10,000 black and white dockworkers prevented employers’ efforts to eliminate their unions and reduce their wages. This was a remarkable expression of interracial solidarity at a time when segregation had become the norm throughout the South. Other strikes proved less successful. A s ix-month walkout of 25,000 silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913 failed despite publicity generated by the Paterson pageant, in which the strikers reenacted highlights of their struggle before a sympathetic audience at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company was also unsuccessful. Mostly recent immigrants from Europe and Mexico, the 708 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? strikers demanded recognition of the United Mine Workers of America, wage increases, an e ight-hour workday, and the right to shop and live in places not owned by the company. When the walkout began, in September 1913, the mine owners evicted 11,000 strikers and their families from company housing. They moved into tent colonies, which armed militia units soon surrounded. On April 20, 1914, the militia attacked the largest tent city, at Ludlow, and burned it to the ground, killing an estimated twenty to thirty men, women, and children. Seven months after the Ludlow Massacre, the strike was called off. Labor and Civil Liberties The fiery organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, who at the age of e ighty-three had been jailed after addressing the Colorado strikers, later told a New York audience that the union “had only the Constitution; the other side had the bayonets.” Yet the struggle of workers for the right to strike and of labor radicals against restraints on open-air speaking made free speech a significant public issue in the early twentieth century. By and large, the courts rejected their claims. But these battles laid the foundation for the rise of civil liberties as a central component of freedom in twentieth-century America. State courts in the Progressive era regularly issued injunctions prohibiting strikers from speaking, picketing, or distributing literature during labor disputes. Like the abolitionists before them, the labor movement, in the name of freedom, demanded the right to assemble, organize, and spread their views. The investigations of the Commission on Industrial Relations revealed the absence of free speech in many factory communities, with labor organizers prohibited from speaking freely under threat of either violence from private police or suppression by local authorities. “I don’t think we live in a free country or enjoy civil liberties,” Clarence Darrow told the commission. The IWW’s battle for civil liberties breathed new meaning into the idea of freedom of expression. Lacking union halls, its organizers relied on songs, street theater, impromptu organizing meetings, and street corner gatherings to spread their message and attract support. In response to IWW activities, officials in Los Angeles, Spokane, Denver, and more than a dozen other cities limited or prohibited outdoor meetings. To arouse popular support, the IWW filled the jails with members who defied local law by speaking in public. Sometimes, prisoners were brutally treated, as in Spokane, where three died and hundreds were hospitalized after being jailed for violating a local law requiring prior approval of the content of public speeches. In nearly all the free-speech fights, however, the IWW eventually forced local officials to give way. “Whether they agree or disagree with its methods or aims,” wrote one journalist, “all lovers of liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for . . . [keeping] alight the fires of freedom.” VA RI ETI ES O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 709 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898) Women and Economics, by the prolific feminist social critic and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, influenced the new generation of women aspiring to greater independence. It insisted that how people earned a living shaped their entire lives, and that therefore women must free themselves from the home to achieve genuine freedom. It is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service. Women work longer and harder than most men. . . . A truer spirit is the increasing desire of young girls to be independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a while, and the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for money, to the beggary of their position. More and more do fathers give their daughters, and husbands their wives, a definite allowance,—a separate bank account,— something . . . all their own. The spirit of personal independence in the women of today is sure proof that a change has come. . . . The radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us. . . . The growing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable change to our daughters as well as to our sons. . . . One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women not only for their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression. Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression. . . . Economic independence for women necessarily involves a change in the home and family relation. But, if that change is for the advantage of individual and race, we need not fear it. It does not involve a change in the marriage relation except in withdrawing the element of economic dependence, nor in the relation of mother to child save to improve it. But it does involve the exercise of human faculty in women, in social service and exchange rather than in domestic service solely. . . . [Today], when our still developing social needs call for an ever-increasing . . . freedom, the woman in marrying becomes the h ouse- servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the man. . . . When women stand free as economic agents, they will [achieve a] much better fulfilment of their duties as wives and mothers and [contribute] to the vast improvement in health and happiness of the human race. 710 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a From John Mitchell, “The Workingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty” (1910) During the Progressive era, the idea of “industrial liberty” moved to the center of political discussion. Progressive reformers and labor leaders like John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers, condemned the prevailing idea of liberty of contract in favor of a broader definition of economic freedom. While the Declaration of Independence established civil and political liberty, it did not, as you all know, establish industrial liberty. . . . Liberty means more than the right to choose the field of one’s employment. He is not a free man whose family must buy food today with the money that is earned tomorrow. He is not really free who is forced to work unduly long hours and for wages so low that he can not provide the necessities of life for himself and his family; who must live in a crowded tenement and see his children go to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories before their bodies are developed and their minds trained. To have freedom a man must be free from the harrowing fear of hunger and want; he must be in such a position that by the exercise of reasonable frugality he can provide his family with all of the necessities and the reasonable comforts of life. He must be able to educate his children and to provide against sickness, accident, and old age. . . . A number of years ago the legislatures of several coal producing States enacted laws requiring employers to pay the wages of their workmen in lawful money of the United States and to cease the practice of paying wages in merchandise. From time immemorial it had been the custom of coal companies to conduct general supply stores, and the workingmen were required, as a condition of employment, to accept products in lieu of money in return for services rendered. This system was a great hardship to the workmen. . . . The question of the constitutionality of this legislation was carried into the courts and by the highest tribunal it was declared to be an invasion of the workman’s liberty to deny him the right to accept merchandise in lieu of money as payment of his wages. . . . [This is] typical of hundreds of instances in which laws that have been enacted for the protection of the workingmen have been declared by the courts to be unconstitutional, on the QU E STIONS grounds that they invaded the liberty of the working people. . . . Is it not natural 1. What does Gilman see as the main that the workingmen should feel that they obstacles to freedom for women? are being guaranteed the liberties they do 2. What does Mitchell believe will be necesnot want and denied the liberty that is of sary to establish “industrial liberty”? real value to them? May they not exclaim, 3. How do the authors differ in their view of with Madame Roland [of the French Revthe relationship of the family to individual olution], “O Liberty! Liberty! How many freedom? crimes are committed in thy name!” V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 711 The New Feminism During the Progressive era, the word “feminism” first entered the political vocabulary. Inspired by the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Feminist Alliance, a small organization of New York professional women, developed plans to build apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare centers, to free women from the constraints of the home. However, because they were unable to obtain a mortgage, the buildings were never constructed. In 1914, a mass meeting at New York’s Cooper Union debated the question “What is Feminism?” The meeting was sponsored by Heterodoxy, a women’s club located in Greenwich Village that brought together female professionals, academics, and reformers. Feminism, said one speaker, meant woman’s emancipation “both as a human being and a sex-being.” New feminism’s forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the idea of personal freedom. Heterodoxy was part of a new radical “bohemia” (a social circle of artists, writers, and others who reject conventional rules and practices). Its definition of feminism merged issues like the vote and greater economic opportunities with open discussion of sexuality. In New York’s Greenwich Village and counterparts in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, a “lyrical left” came into being in the prewar years. Its members formed discussion clubs, attended experimental theaters, and published magazines. They confidently expected to preside over the emancipation of the human spirit from the prejudices of the nineteenth century. One symbol of the new era was Isadora Duncan, who brought from California a new, expressive dance based on the free movement of a body liberated from the constraints of traditional technique and costume. “I beheld the dance I had always dreamed of,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton on seeing a Duncan performance, “satisfying every sense as a flower does, or a phrase of Mozart’s.” Another sign of artistic revolution was the Armory Show of 1913, an exhibition that exposed New Yorkers to new cubist paintings from Europe by artists previously unknown in the United States, like Pablo Picasso. The lyrical left made freedom the key to its vision of society. At the famed salon in heiress Mabel Dodge’s New York living room, a remarkable array of talented radicals gathered to discuss with equal passion labor unrest, modern trends in the arts, and sexual liberation. “What [women] are really after,” explained Crystal Eastman, is “freedom.” A graduate of New York University Law School, Eastman had taken a leading role both in the suffrage movement and in investigating industrial accidents. But her definition of freedom went beyond the vote, beyond “industrial democracy,” to encompass emotional and sexual self-determination. 712 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? The Rise of Personal Freedom During the Progressive era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex o’clock” in America. The founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, lectured at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909, and discovered that his writings on infantile sexuality, repression, and the irrational sources of human behavior were widely known “even in prudish America.” Issues of intimate personal relations previously confined to private discussion blazed forth in popular magazines and public debates. For the generation of women who adopted the word “feminism” to express their demand for greater liberty, free sexual expression and reproductive choice emerged as critical definitions of women’s emancipation. Greenwich Village became a center of sexual experimentation. The aura of tolerance attracted many homosexuals to the area, and although organized demands for gay rights lay far in the future, the gay community became an important element of the Village’s lifestyle. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond bohemia; they flourished among the young, unmarried, self- supporting women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oft-proclaimed personal independence. The Birth-Control Movement The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for access to birth control, an issue that gave political expression to changing sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to “control one’s body” generally meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a woman’s husband. Now, it suggested the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children. Emma Goldman, who had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania at the age of sixteen, toured the country lecturing on subjects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened attitudes toward homosexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her speeches and distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive devices. “I demand freedom for both sexes,” she proclaimed, “freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.” Goldman constantly ran afoul of the law. By one count, she was arrested more than forty times for dangerous or “obscene” statements or simply to keep her from speaking. By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive information and devices, Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish-American working-class family, placed the birth control movement at the heart of the new feminism. In 1911, she began a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a New York socialist newspaper. Postal officials barred one issue, containing a column on venereal disease, from the mails. The VA RI ETI ES O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 713 next issue of The Call included a blank page with the headline: “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U. S. Post Office.” By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own journal, The Woman Rebel. “No woman can call herself free,” she proclaimed, “who does not own and control her own body [and] can choose consciously whether she will or will not Mothers with baby carriages wait outside Margaret Sanger’s birth-control clinic in be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1916. clinic in a w orking-class neighborhood of Brooklyn and began distributing contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, an action for which she was sentenced to a month in prison. Few Progressives rallied to her defense. But for a time, the birth-control issue became a crossroads where the paths of labor radicals, cultural modernists, and feminists intersected. The IWW and Socialist Party distributed Sanger’s writings. Like the IWW free-speech fights and Goldman’s persistent battle for the right to lecture, Sanger’s travail was part of a rich history of dissent in the Progressive era that helped to focus enlightened opinion on the ways local authorities and national obscenity legislation set rigid limits to Americans’ freedom of expression. Slowly, laws banning birth control began to change. But since access was determined by individual states, even when some liberalized their laws, birth control remained unavailable in many others. Native American Progressivism Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice. Because many of the society’s leaders had been educated at g overnment-sponsored boarding schools, the society united Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a p an-Indian public space independent of white control. Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals of federal Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings on reservations into family farms. But Carlos Montezuma, a founder of the Society of American Indians, became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been 714 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? captured as a child by members of a neighboring tribe and sold to a traveling photographer, who brought him to Chicago. There Montezuma attended school and eventually obtained a medical degree. In 1916, Montezuma established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning “signaling”), that condemned federal paternalism toward the Indians and called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Convinced that outsiders exerted too much power over life on the reservations, he insisted that s elf-determination was the only way for Indians to escape poverty and marginalization: “We must free ourselves. . . . We must be independent.” But he also demanded that Indians be granted full citizenship and all the constitutional rights of other Americans. Montezuma’s writings had little influence at the time on government policy, but Indian activists would later rediscover him as a forerunner of Indian radicalism. THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM Effective Freedom Progressivism was an international movement. In the early twentieth century, cities throughout the world experienced similar social strains arising from rapid industrialization and urban growth. In 1850, London and Paris were the only cities whose population exceeded 1 million. By 1900, there were t welve— New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the United States, and others in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Facing similar social problems, reformers across the globe exchanged ideas and envisioned new social policies. Sun Y at-Sen, the Chinese leader, was influenced by the writings of Henry George and Edward Bellamy. As governments in Britain, France, and Germany instituted old age pensions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regulation of workplace safety, American reformers came to believe they had much to learn from the Old World. The term “social legislation,” meaning governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities of w orking-class life, originated in Germany but soon entered the political vocabulary of the United States. Progressives believed that the modern era required a fundamental rethinking of the functions of political authority, whether the aim was to combat the power of the giant corporations, protect consumers, civilize the marketplace, or guarantee industrial freedom at the workplace. Drawing on the reform programs of the Gilded Age and the example of European legislation, Progressives sought to reinvigorate the idea of an activist, socially conscious government. Even in South Carolina, with its strong tradition of belief in local autonomy, Governor Richard I. Manning urged his constituents to modify their view of TH E PO LI TI CS O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 715 A photograph from 1910 depicts needy constituents of New York political boss Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan receiving free pairs of shoes. Each year, Sullivan distributed two thousand pairs on his mother’s birthday. Such largesse endeared political bosses to many voters, to the annoyance of municipal reformers. government as “a threat to individual liberty,” to see it instead as “a means for solving the ills of the body politic.” Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful government posed a threat to freedom, because their understanding of freedom was itself in flux. “Effective freedom,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, was a positive, not a negative, c oncept—the “power to do specific things.” As such, it depended on “the distribution of powers that exists at a given time.” Thus, freedom inevitably became a political question. State and Local Reforms Throughout the Western world, social legislation proliferated in the early twentieth century. In the United States, with a political structure more decentralized than in European countries, state and local governments enacted most of the era’s reform measures. In cities, Progressives worked to reform the structure of government to reduce the power of political bosses, establish public control of “natural monopolies” like gas and water works, and improve public transportation. They raised property taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other public facilities. Gilded Age mayors Hazen Pingree and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones pioneered urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe manufacturer, Pingree served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897. He battled the business interests that had dominated city government, forcing gas and telephone companies to lower their rates, and established a municipal power plant. Jones had instituted an e ight-hour day and paid vacations at his factory that produced oil drilling equipment. As mayor of Toledo, Ohio, from 1897 to 1905, he founded night schools and free kindergartens, built new parks, and supported the right of workers to unionize. Since state legislatures defined the powers of city government, urban Progressives often carried their campaigns to the state level. Pingree became governor of Michigan in 1896, in which post he continued his battle against railroads and other corporate interests. Progressivism in the West Although often associated with eastern cities, Progressivism was also a major presence in the West. Former Populists and those who believed in the moral 716 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? power of the frontier gravitated to Progressive programs to regulate the railroads and other large corporations, and to the idea that direct democracy could revitalize corrupt politics. Important Progressive leaders worked for reform in western states and municipalities, including Hiram Johnson of California and Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Oregon stood at the forefront of Progressive reform. The leading figure in that state was William U’Ren, a lawyer who had entered politics as a supporter of Henry George’s single-tax program. U’Ren concluded that without changes to the political system, entrenched interests would always be able to block reforms such as George’s. He was the founder of the Oregon System, which included such m easures as the initiative and referendum (also known as direct legislature, which enabled voters to propose and vote on laws), direct primaries to choose candidates for office (an effort to weaken the power of political bosses), and the recall (by which officials could be removed from office by popular vote). Using the initiative, Progressives won the vote for women in the state. The Oregon system, studied and emulated in many other states, came into being via an alliance of the urban middle class with reform-minded farmers and workers. But fault lines appeared when l abor-oriented Progressives tried to use the initiative and referendum to increase taxes on the well-to-do and require the state to provide jobs for the unemployed. Both measures failed. Moreover, the initiative system quickly became out of control. In the 1912 election, voters in Portland were asked to evaluate forty measures seeking to become law. Nonetheless, between 1910 and 1912, Oregon’s West Coast neighbors, Washington and California, also adopted the initiative and referendum and approved woman suffrage. In California, where a Republican machine closely tied to the Southern Pacific Railroad had dominated politics for decades, Progressives took power under Governor Hiram Johnson, who held office from 1911 to 1917. As public prosecutor, Johnson had secured the conviction for bribery of San Francisco political boss Abraham Ruef. Having promised to “kick the Southern Pacific [Railroad] out of politics,” he secured passage of the Public Utilities Act, one of the country’s strongest r ailroad-regulation measures, as well as laws banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women. The most influential Progressive administration at the state level was that of Robert M. La Follette, who made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy.” After serving as a Republican member of Congress, La Follette became convinced that an alliance of railroad and lumber companies controlled state politics. Elected governor in 1900, he instituted a series of measures known as the Wisconsin Idea, including nominations of candidates for office through primary elections rather than by political bosses, the taxation of corporate wealth, and state regulation of railroads and public utilities. Other measures created a TH E PO LI TI CS O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 717 statewide system of insurance against illness, death, and accident, barred the sale to private companies of land, mineral rights, and other natural resources owned by the state, required safety devices on various forms of machinery, and prohibited child labor. To staff his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin offered the most striking merger of the social and political impulses that went under the name of Progressivism. Progressive Democracy “We are far from free,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us.” Progressives hoped to reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry and civic harmony to a divided society. Alarmed by the upsurge in violent class conflict and the unrestricted power of corporations, they believed that political reforms could help to create a unified “people” devoted to greater democracy and social reconciliation. Yet increasing the responsibilities of government made it all the more important to identify who was entitled to political participation and who was not. The Progressive era saw a host of changes implemented in the political process, many seemingly contradictory in purpose. The electorate was simultaneously expanded and contracted, empowered and removed from direct influence on many functions of government. Democracy was enhanced by the Seventeenth Amendment—which provided that U.S. senators be chosen by popular vote rather than by state l egislatures—by widespread adoption of the popular election of judges, and by the use of primary elections among party members to select candidates for office. The era culminated with a constitutional amendment enfranchising w omen—the largest expansion of democracy in American history. But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation, most strikingly the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a process, as noted in Chapter 17, supported by many white southern Progressives as a way of ending election fraud. To make city government more honest and efficient, many localities replaced elected mayors with appointed nonpartisan commissions or city managers—a change that insulated officials from machine domination but also from popular control. New literacy tests and residency and registration requirements, common in northern as well as southern states, limited the right to vote among the poor. Taken as a whole, the electoral changes of the Progressive era represented a significant reversal of the idea that voting was an inherent right of American citizenship. In the eyes of many Progressives, the “fitness” of voters, not their absolute numbers, defined a functioning democracy. 718 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? Government by Expert “He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” The writer H. L. Mencken’s quip about Theodore Roosevelt came uncomfortably close to the mark for many Progressive advocates of an empowered state. Most Progressive thinkers were highly uncomfortable with the real world of politics, which seemed to revolve around the pursuit of narrow class, ethnic, and regional interests. Robert M. La Follette’s reliance on college professors to staff important posts in his administration reflected a larger Progressive faith in expertise. The government could best exercise intelligent control over society through a democracy run by impartial experts who were in many respects unaccountable to the citizenry. This impulse toward order, efficiency, and centralized management—all in the name of social justice—was an important theme of Progressive reform. The title of Walter Lippmann’s influential 1914 work of social commentary, Drift and Mastery, posed the stark alternatives facing the nation. “Drift” meant continuing to operate according to the outmoded belief in individual autonomy. “Mastery” required applying scientific inquiry to modern social problems. The new generation of educated professionals, Lippmann believed, could be trusted more fully than ordinary citizens to solve America’s deep social problems. Political freedom was less a matter of direct participation in government than of qualified persons devising the best public policies. Jane Addams and Hull House But alongside this elitist politics, Progressivism also included a more democratic vision of the activist state. As much as any other group, organized women reformers spoke for the more democratic side of Progressivism. Still barred from voting and holding office in most states, women nonetheless became central to the political history of the Progressive era. Women challenged the barriers that excluded them from formal political participation and developed a democratic, grassroots vision of Progressive government. In so doing, they placed on the political agenda new understandings of female freedom. The immediate catalyst was a growing awareness among women reformers of the plight of poor immigrant communities and the emergence of the condition of women and child laborers as a major focus of public concern. The era’s most prominent female reformer was Jane Addams, who had been born in 1860, the daughter of an Illinois businessman. After graduating from college, Addams, who never married, resented the prevailing expectation that a woman’s life should be governed by what she called the “family claim”—the obligation to devote herself to parents, husband, and children. In 1889, she founded Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house devoted to improving TH E PO LI TI CS O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 719 the lives of the immigrant poor. Hull House was modeled on Toynbee Hall, which Addams had visited after its establishment in a working-class neighborhood of London in 1884. Unlike previous reformers, who had aided the poor from afar, settlement-house workers moved into poor neighborhoods. They built kindergartens and playgrounds for children, established employment bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of domestic abuse how to gain legal protection. By 1910, more than 400 settlement houses had been established in cities throughout the country. “Spearheads for Reform” Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were more than 80,000 c ollege-educated women in the United States. Many found a calling in providing social services, nursing, and education to poor families in the growing cities. The efforts of middle-class women to uplift the poor, and of laboring women to uplift themselves, helped to shift the center of gravity of politics toward activist government. Women like Addams discovered that even well-organized social work was not enough to alleviate the problems of inadequate housing, income, and health. Government action was essential. Hull House instigated an array of reforms in Chicago, soon adopted elsewhere, including stronger building and sanitation codes, shorter working hours and safer labor conditions, and the right of labor to organize. Female activism spread throughout the country. Ironically, the exclusion of blacks from jobs in southern textile mills strengthened the region’s movement against child labor. Reformers portrayed child labor as a menace to white supremacy, depriving white children of educations they would need as adult members of the dominant race. These reformers devoted little attention to the condition of black children. Women’s groups in Alabama were instrumental in the passage of a 1903 state law restricting child labor. By 1915, every southern state had followed suit. But with textile mill owners determined to employ children and many poor families dependent on their earnings, these laws were enforced only sporadically. The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” They produced prominent Progressive figures like Julia Lathrop, the first woman to head a federal agency (the Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 to investigate the conditions of mothers and children and advocate their interests). Florence Kelley, the daughter of Civil W ar–era Radical Republican congressman William D. Kelley and a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s power as consumers as a force for social change. In the Gilded Age, the writer Helen Campbell had brilliantly exposed the contradiction of a market economy in which fashionable women wore clothing produced by poor women in 720 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? Mayor Mary W. Howard (center) and the town council of Kanab, Utah. They served from 1912 to 1914, the first a ll-female municipal government in American history. wretched sweatshops. “Emancipation on the one side,” she pointedly observed, “has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other.” A generation later, under Kelley’s leadership, the National Consumers’ League became the nation’s leading advocate of laws governing the working conditions of women and children. Freedom of choice in the marketplace, Kelley insisted, enabled socially conscious consumers to “unite with wage earners” by refusing to purchase goods produced under exploitative conditions. The Campaign for Woman Suffrage After 1900, the campaign for woman suffrage moved beyond the mostly elite membership of the 1890s to engage a broad coalition ranging from middle- class members of women’s clubs to unionists, socialists, and settlement-house workers. For the first time, it became a mass movement. Membership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association grew from 13,000 in 1893 to more than 2 million by 1917. The group campaigned throughout the country for the right to vote and began to enjoy some success. By 1900, more than half the states allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues, and Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah had adopted full woman suffrage. The West also led the way in women holding public office. The first women to become mayors of major cities, governors, and members of Congress hailed TH E PO LI TI CS O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 721 from the West—Mayor Bertha Landes in Seattle (1926–1928), Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin of Montana (elected 1916 and 1940), and, in the 1920s, governors Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming. Cynics charged that Wyoming legislators used suffrage to attract more female migrants to their predominantly male state, while Utah hoped to enhance the political power of husbands in polygamous marriages banned by law but still practiced by some Mormons. In Colorado and Idaho, however, the success of referendums in the 1890s reflected the power of the Populist Party, a strong supporter of votes for women. Between 1910 and 1914, seven more western states enfranchised women. In 1913, Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi River to allow women to vote in presidential elections. These campaigns, which brought women aggressively into the public sphere, were conducted with a new spirit of militancy. They also made effective use of the techniques of advertising, publicity, and mass entertainment characteristic of modern consumer society. California’s successful 1911 campaign utilized automobile parades, numerous billboards and electric signs, and countless suffrage buttons and badges. Nonetheless, state campaigns were difficult, expensive, and usually unsuccessful. The movement increasingly focused its attention on securing a national constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. Maternalist Reform Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s role within the home did much to inspire the reinvigoration of the suffrage movement. Many of the era’s experiments in public policy arose from the conviction that the state had an obligation to protect women and children. Female reformers helped to launch a mass movement for direct g overnment action to improve the living standards of poor mothers and children. Laws providing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of young children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. The pensions tended to be less than generous, and local eligibility requirements opened the door to unequal treatment (white widows benefited the most, single mothers were widely discriminated against, and black women were almost entirely excluded). Maternalist reforms like mothers’ pensions rested on the assumption that the government should encourage women’s capacity for bearing and raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same time. Both feminists and believers in conventional domestic roles supported such measures. The former hoped that these laws would subvert women’s dependence on men, the latter that they would strengthen traditional families and the mother-child bond. Other Progressive legislation recognized that large numbers of women did in fact work outside the home, but defined them as a dependent group (like 722 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? According to this cartoon, giving women the right to vote will clean up political corruption and misgovernment. children) in need of state protection in ways male workers were not. In 1908, in the landmark case of Muller v. Oregon, Louis D. Brandeis filed a brief citing scientific and sociological studies to demonstrate that because women had less strength and endurance than men, long hours of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear children gave the government a legitimate interest in their working conditions. Persuaded by Brandeis’s argument, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for women. Thus, three years after the notorious Lochner decision invalidating a New York law limiting the working hours of male bakers (discussed in Chapter 16), the Court created the first large breach in “liberty of contract” doctrine. But the cost was high: at the very time that women in unprecedented numbers were entering the labor market and earning college degrees, Brandeis’s brief and the Court’s opinion solidified the view of women workers as weak, dependent, and incapable of enjoying the same economic rights as men. By 1917, thirty states had enacted laws limiting the hours of labor of female workers. Many women derived great benefit from these laws; others saw them as an infringement on their freedom. While the maternalist agenda built gender inequality into the early foundations of the welfare state, the very use of government to regulate working TH E PO LI TI CS O F P R O G R E S S I V I S M ★ 723 conditions called into question basic assumptions concerning liberty of contract. Although not all reformers were willing to take the step, it was easy to extend the idea of protecting women and children to demand that government better the living and working conditions of men as well, by insuring them against the impact of unemployment, old age, ill health, and disability. Brandeis himself insisted that government should concern itself with the health, income, and future prospects of all its citizens. The Idea of Economic Citizenship Brandeis envisioned a different welfare state from that of the maternalist reformers, one rooted less in the idea of healthy motherhood than in the notion of universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent income and protection against unemployment and w ork-related accidents. For him, the right to assistance derived from citizenship itself, not some special service to the nation (as in the case of mothers) or upstanding character (which had long differentiated the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor). This vision, too, enjoyed considerable support in the Progressive era. By 1913, twenty-two states had enacted workmen’s compensation laws to benefit workers, male or female, injured on the job. This legislation was the first wedge that opened the way for broader programs of social insurance. To avoid the stigma of depending on governmental assistance, contributions from workers’ own wages funded these programs in part, thus distinguishing them from charity dispensed by local authorities to the poor. But state minimum wage laws and most laws regulating working hours applied only to women. Women and children may have needed protection, but interference with the freedom of contract of adult male workers was still widely seen as degrading. The establishment of a standard of living and working conditions beneath which no American, male or female, should be allowed to fall would await the coming of the New Deal. THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS Despite the ferment of Progressivism on the city and state levels, the most striking political development of the early twentieth century was the rise of the national state. The process of nationalization was occurring throughout American life. National corporations dominated the economy; national organizations like the American Medical Association came into being to raise the incomes and respect of professions. The process was even reflected in the consolidation of local baseball teams into the American and National Leagues and 724 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state? the advent in 1903 of the World Series. Only energetic national government, Progressives believed, could create the social conditions of freedom. Despite creative experiments in social policy at the city and state levels, the tradition of localism seemed to most Progressives an impediment to a renewed sense of national purpose. Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of industrial democracy were national problems that demanded national solutions. The democratic national state, wrote New Republic editor Herbert Croly, offered an alternative to control of Americans’ lives by narrow interests that manipulated politics or by the a ll-powerful corporations. Croly proposed a new synthesis of American political traditions. To achieve the “Jeffersonian ends” of democratic self-determination and individual freedom, he insisted, the country needed to employ the “Hamiltonian means” of government intervention in the economy. Each in his own way, the Progressive presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—tried to address this challenge. Theodore Roosevelt In September 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley while the president visited the Pan- American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. At the age of f orty-two, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man ever to hold the office of president. Roosevelt was an impetuous, energetic individual with a penchant for what he called the “strenuous life” of manly adventure. In many ways, he became the model for the t wentieth- century president, an official actively and continuously engaged in domestic and foreign affairs. (The foreign policies of the Progressive presidents will be discussed in the next chapter.) Roosevelt regarded the president as “the steward of the public welfare.” He moved aggressively to set the political agenda. Roosevelt’s program, which he called the Square Deal, attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations. The former, among which he included U.S. Steel, served the public interest. The latter were run by greedy financiers interested only in profit, and had no right to exist. Soon after assuming office, Roosevelt shocked the corporate world by announcing his intention to prosecute under the Sherman Antitrust Act the Northern Securities Company. Created by financier J. P. Morgan, this “holding company” owned the stock and directed the affairs of three major western railroads. It monopolized transportation between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. Morgan was outraged. “Wall Street is paralyzed,” quipped one newspaper, “at the thought that a President of the United States should sink to enforce the law.” In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, a major victory for the antitrust movement. TH E PRO G R E S S I V E P R E S I D E N T S ★ 725 Roosevelt and Economic Regulation Roosevelt also believed that the president should be an honest broker in labor disputes, rather than automatically siding with employers as his predecessors had usually done. When a strike paralyzed the West Virginia and Pennsylvania coalfields in 1902, he summoned union and management leaders to the White House. By threatening a federal takeover of the mines, he persuaded the owners to allow the dispute to be settled by a commission he himself would appoint. Reelected in 1904, Roosevelt pushed for more direct federal regulation of President Theodore Roosevelt addressing a the economy. Appealing to the public crowd in 1902. for support, he condemned the misuse of the “vast power conferred by vast wealth.” He proposed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission, which the Supreme Court had essentially limited to collecting economic statistics. By this time, journalistic exposés, labor unrest, and the agitation of Progressive reformers had created significant public support for Roosevelt’s regulatory program. In 1906, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, giving the ICC the power to examine railroads’ business records and to set reasonable rates, a significant step in the development of federal intervention in the corporate economy. That year, as has been noted, also saw the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established a federal agency to police the quality and labeling of food and drugs, and the Meat Inspection Act. Many businessmen supported these measures, recognizing that they would benefit from greater public confidence in the quality and safety of their products. But even they were alarmed by Roosevelt’s calls for federal inheritance and income taxes and the regulation of all interstate businesses. John Muir and the Spirituality of Nature If the United States lagged behind Europe in many areas of social policy, it led the way in the conservation of natural resources. The first national park, Yellowstone in Wyoming, was created by Congress in 1872, partly to preserve 726 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state? an area of remarkable natural beauty and partly at the urging of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was anxious to promote western tourism. In the 1890s, the S cottish-born naturalist John Muir organized the Sierra Club to help preserve forests from uncontrolled logging by timber companies. Muir’s love of nature stemmed from deep religious feelings. Nearly blinded in an accident in an Indianapolis machine shop where he worked in his twenties, he found in the restoration of his sight an inspiration to appreciate God’s creation. He called forests “God’s first temples.” In nature, he believed, men could experience directly the presence of God. Muir’s outlook blended evangelical Protestantism with a romantic view of nature inspired by the Transcendentalists of the pre–Civil War era—like Henry David Thoreau, he lamented the intrusions of civilization on the natural environment. But unlike the Transcendentalists, Muir developed a broad following. As more and more Americans lived in cities, they came to see nature less as something to conquer and more as a place for recreation and personal growth. The Conservation Movement In the 1890s, Congress authorized the president to withdraw “forest reserves” from economic development, a restriction on economic freedom in the name of a greater social good. But it was under Theodore Roosevelt that the conservation movement became a concerted federal policy. A dedicated outdoorsman who built a ranch in North Dakota in the 1880s, Roosevelt moved to preserve parts of the natural environment from economic exploitation. Relying for advice on Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, he ordered that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create new national parks. The creation of parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier required the removal of Indians who hunted and fished there as well as the reintroduction of animals that had previously disappeared. City dwellers who visited the national parks did not realize that these were to a considerable extent artificially created and managed environments, not primordial nature. In some ways, conservation was a typical Progressive reform. Manned by experts, the government could stand above political and economic battles, serving the public good while preventing “special interests” from causing irreparable damage to the environment. The aim was less to end the economic utilization of natural resources than to develop responsible, scientific plans for their use. Pinchot halted timber companies’ reckless assault on the nation’s forests. But unlike Muir, he believed that development and conservation could go hand in hand and that logging, mining, and grazing on public lands should be controlled, not eliminated. Conservation also reflected the Progressive thrust toward efficiency and control—in this case, control of nature itself. TH E PRO G R E S S I V E P R E S I D E N T S ★ 727 In the view of Progressive conservationists, the West’s scarcest resource— ater—cried out for regulation. Governments at all levels moved to control w the power of western rivers, building dams and irrigation projects to regularize their flow, prevent waste, and provide water for large-scale agriculture and urban development. With such projects came political conflict, as cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco battled with rural areas for access to water. After secretly buying up large tracts of land in the Owens Valley east of the city, for example, the city of Los Angeles constructed a major aqueduct between 1908 and 1913, over the vigorous objections of the valley’s residents. By the 1920s, so much water had been diverted to the city that the once thriving farming and ranching businesses of Owens Valley could no longer operate. Taft in Office Having served nearly eight years as president, Roosevelt did not run again in 1908. His chosen successor was William Howard Taft, a federal judge from Ohio who had served as governor of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan, making his third unsuccessful race for the White House. Taft’s inaugural address expressed the Progressive view of the state: “The scope of a modern government . . . has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old ‘laissez-faire’ school of political writers.” Although temperamentally more conservative than Roosevelt, Taft pursued antitrust policy even more aggressively. He persuaded the Supreme Court in 1911 to declare John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (one of Roosevelt’s “good” trusts) in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and to order its breakup into separate marketing, producing, and refining companies. The government also won a case against American Tobacco, which the Court ordered to end pricing policies that were driving smaller firms out of business. In these decisions, the justices announced a new standard for judging large corporations—the “rule of reason”—which in effect implemented Roosevelt’s old distinction between good and bad trusts. Big businesses were not, in and of themselves, antitrust violators, unless they engaged in policies that stifled competition. Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which authorized Congress to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier citizens). It was ratified shortly before he left office. A 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000 had been included in a tariff enacted in 1894 but had been quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as a “communistic threat to property.” The movement to resurrect the income tax united southern and western farmers who wished to reduce government dependence on revenue from the tariff, which they believed discriminated 728 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state? against nonindustrial states, and Progressives who believed that taxation should be based on the ability to pay. A key step in the modernization of the federal government, the income tax provided a reliable and flexible source of revenue for a national state whose powers, responsibilities, and expenditures were growing rapidly. Despite these accomplishments, Taft seemed to gravitate toward the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Only a few months after taking office, he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which reduced rates on imported goods but not nearly as much as reformers wished. Taft’s rift with Progressives grew deeper when Richard A. Ballinger, the secretary of the interior, concluded that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority in placing land in forest reserves. Ballinger decided to return some of this land to the public domain, where mining and lumber companies would have access to it. Gifford Pinchot accused Ballinger of colluding with business interests and repudiating the environmental goals of the Roosevelt administration. When Taft fired Pinchot in 1910, the breach with party Progressives became irreparable. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination. Defeated, Roosevelt launched an independent campaign as the head of the new Progressive Party. The Election of 1912 All the crosscurrents of P rogressive-era thinking about what McClure’s Magazine called “the problem of the relation of the State and the corporation” came together in the presidential campaign of 1912. The f our-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in the age of big business. At one end of the political spectrum stood Taft, who stressed that economic individualism could remain the foundation of the social order so long as government and private entrepreneurs cooperated in addressing social ills. At the other end was Debs. Relatively few Americans supported the Socialist Party’s goal of abolishing the “capitalistic system” altogether, but its immediate d emands—including public ownership of the railroads and banking system, government aid to the unemployed, and laws establishing shorter working hours and a minimum w age— summarized forward-looking Progressive thought. But it was the battle between Wilson and Roosevelt over the role of the federal government in securing economic freedom that galvanized public attention in 1912. The two represented competing strands of Progressivism. Both believed government action necessary to preserve individual freedom, but they differed over the dangers of increasing the government’s power and TH E PRO G R E S S I V E P R E S I D E N T S ★ 729 Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, speaking in Chicago during the 1912 presidential campaign. the inevitability of economic concentration. Though representing a party thoroughly steeped in states’ rights and laissez-faire ideology, Wilson was deeply imbued with Progressive ideas. “Freedom today,” he declared, “is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.” As governor of New Jersey, Wilson had presided over the implementation of a system of workmen’s compensation and state regulation of utilities and railroads. New Freedom and New Nationalism Strongly influenced by Louis D. Brandeis, with whom he consulted frequently during the campaign, Wilson insisted that democracy must be reinvigorated by restoring market competition and freeing government from domination by big business. Wilson feared big government as much as he feared the power of the corporations. The New Freedom, as he called his program, envisioned the federal government strengthening antitrust laws, protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small b usinesses—creating, in other words, the conditions for the renewal of economic competition without increasing government regulation of the economy. Wilson warned that corporations were as likely to corrupt government as to be managed by it, a forecast that proved remarkably accurate. To Roosevelt’s supporters, Wilson seemed a relic of a bygone era; his program, they argued, served the needs of small businessmen but ignored the inevitability of economic concentration and the interests of professionals, consumers, and labor. Wilson and Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness.” What the nation actually needed, Walter Lippmann countered, was frank acceptance of the benefits of bigness, coupled with the intervention of government to counteract its abuses. Lippmann was expressing the core of the New Nationalism, Roosevelt’s program of 1912. Only the “controlling and directing power of the government,” Roosevelt insisted, could restore “the liberty of the oppressed.” He called for heavy taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil. The Progressive Party platform offered numerous proposals to promote social justice. Drafted by a group of s ettlement-house activists, labor reformers, 730 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state? and social scientists, the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with woman suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for all workers, and a national system of social insurance covering unemployment, medical care, and old age. Described by Roosevelt as the “most important document” since the end of the Civil War, the platform brought together many of the streams of thought and political experiences that flowed into Progressivism. Roosevelt’s campaign helped to give freedom a modern social and economic content and established an agenda that would define political liberalism for much of the twentieth century. Wilson’s First Term The Republican split ensured a sweeping victory for Wilson, who won about 42 percent of the popular vote, although Roosevelt humiliated Taft by winning about 27 percent to the president’s 23 percent. In office, Wilson proved himself a strong executive leader. He established an office at the Capitol so that he could confer regularly with members of Congress about pending legislation, and he was the first president to hold regular press conferences in order to influence public opinion directly and continuously. He delivered messages personally to Congress rather than sending them in written form, as had all his predecessors since John Adams. With Democrats in control of Congress, Wilson moved aggressively to implement his version of Progressivism. The first significant measure of his presidency was the Underwood Tariff, which substantially reduced duties on imports and, to make up for lost revenue, imposed a graduated income tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans. There followed the Clayton Act of 1914, which exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issuing injunctions curtailing the right to strike. In 1916 came the Keating-Owen Act outlawing child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate commerce (the Supreme Court would later declare it unconstitutional), the Adamson Act establishing an e ight-hour workday on the nation’s railroads, and the Warehouse Act, reminiscent of the Populist subtreasury plan, which extended credit to farmers when they stored their crops in federally licensed warehouses. The Expanding Role of Government Some of Wilson’s policies seemed more in tune with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism than the New Freedom of 1912. He abandoned the idea of aggressive trust-busting in favor of greater government supervision of the economy. Wilson presided over the creation of two powerful new public agencies. In 1913, TH E PRO G R E S S I V E P R E S I D E N T S ★ 731 Congress created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional banks. They were overseen by a central board appointed by the president and empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and influence interest rates so as to promote economic growth. The law was a delayed response to the Panic of 1907, when the failure of several financial companies threatened a general collapse of the banking system. With the federal government lacking a modern central bank, it had been left to J. P. Morgan to assemble the funds to prop up threatened financial institutions. Morgan’s actions highlighted the fact that in the absence of federal regulation of banking, power over finance rested entirely in private hands. A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and prohibit “unfair” business activities such as price-fixing and monopolistic practices. Both the Federal Reserve and FTC were welcomed by many business leaders as a means of restoring order to the economic marketplace and warding off more radical measures for curbing corporate power. But they reflected the remarkable expansion of the federal role in the economy during the Progressive era. By 1916, the social ferment and political mobilizations of the Progressive era had given birth to a new American state. With new laws, administrative agencies, and independent commissions, government at the local, state, and national levels had assumed the authority to protect and advance “industrial freedom.” Government had established rules for labor relations, business behavior, and financial policy, protected citizens from market abuses, and acted as a broker among the groups whose conflicts threatened to destroy social harmony. But a storm was already engulfing Europe that would test the Progressive faith in empowered government as the protector of American freedom. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Identify the main groups and ideas that drove the Progressive movement. 2.Explain how immigration to the United States in this period was part of a global movement of peoples. 3. Describe how Fordism transformed American industrial and consumer society. 4.Socialism was a rising force across the globe in the early twentieth century. How successful was the movement in the United States? 732 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Pr ogr es s i ve Er a 5.Explain why the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) grew so rapidly and aroused so much opposition. 6.How did immigrants adjust to life in America? What institutions or activities became important to their adjustment, and why? 7.What did Progressive-era feminists want to change in society, and how did their actions help to spearhead broader reforms? 8.How did ideas of women’s roles, shared by maternalist reformers, lead to an expansion of activism by and rights for women? 9. How did each Progressive-era president view the role of the federal government? 10. Pick a Progressive-era reform (a movement, specific legislation, and organization) and describe how it shows how Progressives could work for both the expansion of democracy and restrictions on it. KEY TERMS Progressivism (p. 692) Society of American Indians (p. 714) muckraking (p. 695) Seventeenth Amendment (p. 718) Ellis Island (p. 697) settlement house (p. 719) Fordism (p. 702) maternalist reforms (p. 722) “American standard of living” (p. 703) Muller v. Oregon (p. 723) scientific management (p. 704) Pure Food and Drug Act (p. 726) Socialist Party (p. 705) conservation movement (p. 727) collective bargaining (p. 707) Sixteenth Amendment (p. 728) Industrial Workers of the World (p. 707) Progressive Party (p. 729) new feminism (p. 712) New Nationalism (p. 730) birth control movement (p. 713) Federal Trade Commission (p. 732) Go to New Freedom (p. 730) Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 733 ★ CHAPTER 19 ★ SA F E F OR DE MOCR ACY: THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD WAR I 1916–1920 FOCUS QUESTIONS • In what ways did the Progressive presidents promote the expansion of American power overseas? • How did the United States get involved in World War I? • How did the United States mobilize resources and public opinion for the war effort? • How did the war affect race relations in the United States? • Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? I n 1902, W. T. Stead published a short volume with the arresting title The Americanization of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century. Stead was an English editor whose sensational writings included an exposé of L ondon prostitution, Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. He would meet his death in 1912 as a passenger on the Titanic, the ocean liner that foundered after striking 734 ★ an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Impressed by Americans’ “exuberant energies,” Stead predicted that the United States would soon emerge as “the greatest of w orld-powers.” But what was most striking about his work was that Stead located the source of American power less in the realm of military might or territorial acquisition than in the country’s single-minded commitment to the “pursuit of wealth” and the relentless international spread of American c ulture—art, music, journalism, even ideas about religion and gender relations. He foresaw a future in which the United States promoted its interests and values through an unending involvement in the affairs of other nations. Stead proved to be an accurate prophet. The Spanish-American War had established the United States as an international empire. Despite the conquest of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, however, the country’s overseas holdings remained tiny compared to those of Britain, France, and Germany. And no more were added, except for a strip of land surrounding the Panama Canal, acquired in 1903, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in 1917. In 1900, Great Britain ruled over more than 300 million people in possessions scattered across the globe, and France had nearly 50 million subjects in Asia and Africa. Compared with these, the American presence in the world seemed very small. As Stead suggested, America’s empire differed significantly from those of European countries—it was economic, cultural, and intellectual, rather than territorial. The world economy at the dawn of the twentieth century was already highly globalized. An ever- increasing stream of goods, investments, and people flowed from country to country. Although Britain still • CHRONOLOGY • 1903 United States secures the Panama Canal Zone 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine 1905 The Niagara movement established 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan 1909 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized 1910 Mexican Revolution begins 1914– 1919 World War I 1915 Lusitania sinks 1916 Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” 1917 Zimmermann Telegram intercepted United States enters the war Espionage Act passed Russian Revolution 1918 Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech Eugene V. Debs convicted under the Espionage Act 1918– 1920 Worldwide flu epidemic 1919 Eighteenth Amendment Treaty of Versailles signed 1919– 1920 Red Scare 1920 Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles Nineteenth Amendment 1921 Tulsa Riot • SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY: THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD WAR I ★ 735 • ominated world banking and the British pound remained the major c urrency d of international trade, the United States had become the leading industrial power. By 1914, it produced more than o ne-third of the world’s manufactured goods. Already, Europeans complained of an “American invasion” of steel, oil, agricultural equipment, and consumer goods. Spearheads of American culture like movies and popular music were not far behind. Europeans were fascinated by American ingenuity and mass production techniques. Many feared American products and culture would overwhelm their own. “What are the chief new features of London life?” one British writer asked in 1901. “They are the telephone, the portable camera, the phonograph, the electric street car, the automobile, the typewriter. . . . In every one of these the American maker is supreme.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans traveled abroad each year in the early twentieth century. And American racial and ethnic groups became heavily engaged in overseas politics. Through fraternal, religious, and political organizations based in their ethnic and racial communities, Irish-Americans supported Irish independence, American Jews protested the treatment of their c o-religionists in Russia, and black Americans hoped to uplift Africa. American influence was growing throughout the world. America’s burgeoning connections with the outside world led to increasing military and political involvement. In the two decades after 1900, many of the basic principles that would guide American foreign policy for the rest of the century were formulated. The “open door”—the free flow of trade, investment, information, and c ulture—emerged as a key principle of American foreign relations. “Since the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market,” wrote Woodrow Wilson, “the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of nations which are closed against him must be battered down.” Americans in the twentieth century often discussed foreign policy in the language of freedom. At least in rhetoric, the United States ventured abroad— including intervening militarily in the affairs of other n ations—not to pursue strategic goals or to make the world safe for American economic interests, but to promote liberty and democracy. A supreme faith in America’s historic destiny and in the righteousness of its ideals enabled the country’s leaders to think of the United States simultaneously as an emerging great power and as the worldwide embodiment of freedom. More than any other individual, Woodrow Wilson articulated this vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. His foreign policy, called by historians liberal internationalism, rested on the conviction that economic and political progress went hand in hand. Thus, greater worldwide freedom would follow inevitably from increased American investment and trade abroad. Frequently during the twentieth century, this conviction would serve as a mask for American power and s elf-interest. It would also inspire sincere efforts to 736 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I In what ways did the Progressive presidents promote the expansion of American power overseas? bring freedom to other peoples. In either case, liberal internationalism represented a shift from the nineteenth-century tradition of promoting freedom primarily by example, to active intervention to remake the world in the American image. American involvement in World War I provided the first great test of Wilson’s belief that American power could “make the world safe for democracy.” Most Progressives embraced the country’s participation in the war, believing that the United States could help to spread Progressive values throughout the world. The government quickly came to view critics of American involvement not simply as citizens with a different set of opinions, but as enemies of the very ideas of democracy and freedom. As a result, the war produced one of the most sweeping repressions of the right to dissent in all of American history. Rather than bringing Progressivism to other peoples, the war destroyed it at home. AN ERA OF INTERVENTION Just as they expanded the powers of the federal government in domestic affairs, the Progressive presidents were not reluctant to project American power outside the country’s borders. At first, they confined their interventions to the Western Hemisphere, whose affairs the United States had claimed a special right to oversee ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Between 1901 and 1920, U.S. marines landed in Caribbean countries more than twenty times. Usually, they were dispatched to create a welcoming economic environment for American companies that wanted stable access to raw materials like bananas and sugar, and for bankers nervous that their loans to local governments might not be repaid. “I Took the Canal Zone” Just as he distinguished between good and bad trusts, Theodore Roosevelt divided the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized” nations. The former, he believed, had an obligation to establish order in an unruly world. Roosevelt became far more active in international diplomacy than most of his predecessors, helping, for example, to negotiate a settlement of the R usso-Japanese War of 1905, a feat for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Closer to home, his policies were more aggressive. “I have always been fond of the West African proverb,” he wrote, “‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’” And although he declared that the United States “has not the slightest desire for territorial aggrandizement at the expense of its southern neighbors,” Roosevelt pursued a policy of intervention in Central America. A N ERA O F I N T E RV E N T I O N ★ 737 In his first major action in the region, Roosevelt engineered the s epa- Caribbean Limon ration of Panama from Colombia in Sea Bay Colon order to facilitate the construction Madden Lake Locks Gatun of a canal linking the Atlantic and Dam Na Madden Dam vig Pacific Oceans. The idea of a canal Cha atio nne n l across the fifty-one-mile-wide IsthDarien PANAMA Gamboa mus of Panama had a long history. In Las Cascadas G Paraiso 1879–1881, the French engineer FerdiPedro Miguel Locks nand de Lesseps attempted to construct Lake Miraflores Panama City Lock Miraflores Locks Balboa such a waterway but failed because Dam Canal of inadequate funding and the toll Railroad Gulf of Panama Panama Canal Zone exacted on his workers by yellow fever and malaria. Roosevelt had long been Constructed in the first years of the twentieth century, after Theodore Roosevelt helped engia proponent of American naval develneer Panama’s independence from Colombia, opment. He was convinced that a canal the Panama Canal drastically reduced the time would facilitate the movement of naval it took for commercial and naval vessels to sail and commercial vessels between the from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. two oceans. In 1903, when Colombia, of which Panama was a part, refused to cede land for the project, Roosevelt helped to set in motion an uprising by conspirators led by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a representative of the Panama Canal Company. An American gunboat prevented the Colombian army from suppressing the rebellion. Upon establishing Panama’s independence, Bunau-Varilla signed a treaty giving the United States both the right to construct and operate a canal and sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone, a ten-mile-wide strip of land through which the route would run. A remarkable feat of engineering, the canal was the largest construction project in American history to that date. Like the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and much construction work today, it involved the widespread use of immigrant labor. Most of the 60,000 workers came from the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica, but others hailed from Europe, Asia, and the United States. In keeping with American segregation policies, the best jobs were reserved for white Americans, who lived in their own communities complete with schools, churches, and libraries. The project also required a massive effort to eradicate the mosquitoes that carried the tropical diseases responsible, in part, for the failure of earlier efforts. When completed in 1914, the canal reduced the sea voyage between the East and West Coasts of the United States by 8,000 miles. “I took the Canal Zone,” Roosevelt exulted. But the manner in which the canal had been initiated, and the continued American rule over the Canal Zone, would long remain a source of tension. In 1977, as a symbol of a new, noninterventionist U.S. attitude toward Latin T H E PA N A M A C A N A L Z O N E l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l un l l l l at l Lake l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l 738 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I In what ways did the Progressive presidents promote the expansion of American power overseas? America, President Jimmy Carter negotiated treaties that led to turning over the canal’s operation and control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the year 2000 (see Chapter 26). The Roosevelt Corollary Roosevelt’s actions in Panama anticipated the full-fledged implementation of a principle that came to be called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This held that the United States had the right to exercise “an international police power” in the Western H emisphere—a significant expansion of Monroe’s pledge to defend the hemisphere against European intervention. Early in Roosevelt’s administration, British, Italian, and German naval forces blockaded Venezuela to ensure the payment of debts to European bankers. Roosevelt persuaded them to withdraw, but the incident convinced him that financial instability in the New World would invite intervention from the Old. In 1904, Roosevelt ordered American forces to seize the customs houses of the Dominican Republic to ensure payment of that country’s debts to European and American investors. He soon arranged an “executive agreement” giving a group of American banks control over Dominican finances. In 1906, he dispatched troops to Cuba to oversee a disputed election; they remained in the country until 1909. Roosevelt also encouraged investment by American corporations like the United Fruit Company, whose huge banana plantations soon dominated the economies of Honduras and Costa Rica. Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, landed marines in Nicaragua to protect a government friendly to American economic interests. In general, however, Taft emphasized economic investment and loans from American banks, rather than direct military intervention, as the best way to spread American influence. As a result, his foreign policy became known as Dollar Diplomacy. In Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and even L iberia—the West African nation established in 1816 as a home for freed American slaves—Taft pressed for more efficient revenue collection, stable government, and access to land and labor by American companies. Moral Imperialism The son of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson brought to the presidency a missionary zeal and a sense of his own and the nation’s moral righteousness. He appointed as secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, a strong anti-imperialist. Wilson repudiated Dollar Diplomacy and promised a new foreign policy that would respect Latin America’s independence and free it from foreign economic domination. But Wilson could not abandon the conviction that the United States had a responsibility to teach other peoples the lessons of democracy. Moreover, he believed, the export of American manufactured goods A N ERA O F I N T E RV E N T I O N ★ 739 T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S I N T H E C A R I B B E A N , 1 8 9 8 – 1 9 4 1 UNITED STATES Columbus U.S. Expeditionary Force, 1916–1917 Santa Ysabel Houston A t l an t i c O ce an New Orleans Parral U.S. troops, 1898–1902, 1906–1909, 1912, 1917–1922 Platt Amendment, 1903–1934 MEXICO Ba h a ma s ( Br. ) Havana Tampico Mexico City Veracruz Miami U.S. seizure, 1914 U.S. naval base, 1903 CUBA U.S. troops, 1915–1934 Financial supervision, 1916–1941 U.S. takes control of customs house, 1905 DOMINICAN U.S. troops, 1916–1924 REPUBLIC Financial supervision, 1905–1941 U.S. possession after 1898 Guantanamo HAITI Pu e rt o U.S. troops, 1907, J a ma i ca R i co BRITISH ( Br. ) 1924–1925 HONDURAS U.S. troops, 1909–1910, 1912–1925, 1926–1933, Financial supervision, 1911–1924 GUATEMALA U.S. leases Corn Island, HONDURAS 1914 EL SALVADOR PANAMA Caracas NICARAGUA COSTA RICA VENEZUELA Pacific Oce an U.S. acquires Canal Zone, 1904 Canal completed, 1914 Bogotá COLOMBIA Venezuela debt crisis, 1903–1904 V i rg i n I s l an ds (pu r c h as ed fr om D en m ar k , 1 9 1 7) G u adelou p e ( Fr. ) M ar t i n i qu e ( Fr. ) B ar bados ( B r. ) Tr i n i dad ( B r. ) FRENCH BRITISH GUIANA GUIANA DUTCH GUIANA ECUADOR 0 0 250 500 miles 250 500 kilometers PERU BRAZIL Between 1898 and 1941, the United States intervened militarily numerous times in Caribbean countries, generally to protect the economic interests of American banks and investors. and investments went hand in hand with the spread of democratic ideals. To Wilson, expanding American economic influence served a higher purpose than mere profit. Americans, he told a group of businessmen in 1916, were “meant to carry liberty and justice” throughout the world. “Go out and sell goods,” he urged them, “that will make the world more comfortable and happy, and convert them to the principles of America.” Wilson’s moral imperialism produced more military interventions in Latin America than the foreign policy of any president before or since. In 1915, he sent marines to occupy Haiti after the government refused to allow American banks to oversee its financial dealings. In 1916, he established a military government in the Dominican Republic, with the United States controlling the country’s customs collections and paying its debts. American soldiers remained in the Dominican Republic until 1924 and in Haiti until 1934. They built roads and schools, but did little or nothing to promote democracy. Wilson’s foreign policy underscored a paradox of modern American history: the presidents who spoke the most about freedom were likely to intervene most frequently in the affairs of other countries. 740 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I In what ways did the Progressive presidents promote the expansion of American power overseas? COLONIAL POSSESSIONS, 1900 GREENLAND ICELAND Alaska (U.S.) CANADA GREAT DENMARK BRITAIN GERMANY FRANCE SPAIN ITALY CHINA OTTOMAN KOREA JAPAN EMPIRE PERSIA MOROCCO HAITI LIBYA EGYPT ARABIA RIO DE ORO FRENCH Pac ific TAIWAN INDIA MEXICO WEST CUBA DOMINICAN REPUBLIC BURMA (Japanese) Oc e an BRITISH HONDURAS AFRICA Puerto Rico (U.S.) OMAN ANGLOGAMBIA SIAM FRENCH GUATEMALA EGYPTIAN ERITREA VENEZUELA BRITISH GUIANA INDOCHINA EL SALVADOR SUDAN NIGERIA PHILIPPINES ABYSSINIA DUTCH GUIANA SIERRA HONDURAS LEONE CAMEROON ITALIAN NICARAGUA FRENCH MALAYA COLOMBIA UGANDA KAISER LIBERIA TOGO SOMALILAND GUIANA COSTA RICA WILHELMSLAND BELGIAN GOLD PANAMA ECUADOR CONGO GERMAN DUTCH EAST INDIES COAST PAPUA EAST AFRICA FRENCH BRAZIL ANGOLA PERU EQUATORIAL RHODESIA BOLIVIA AFRICA GERMAN MADAGASCAR Pa ci f i c SOUTHWEST PARAGUAY Ind ian AUSTRALIA AFRICA MOZAMBIQUE Ocea n Oc e an UNION OF CHILE SOUTH AFRICA URUGUAY ARGENTINA NEW ZEALAND UNITED STATES Hawaii (U.S.) RUSSIAN EMPIRE SWEDEN NORWAY A t lan t ic O cean PORTUGAL American Belgian British Danish Dutch French German Italian Ottoman Portuguese Russian Spanish Wilson and Mexico Wilson’s major preoccupation in Latin America was Mexico, where in 1911 a revolution led by Francisco Madero overthrew the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Two years later, without Wilson’s knowledge but with the backing of the U.S. ambassador and of American companies that controlled Mexico’s oil and mining industries, military commander Victoriano Huerta assassinated Madero and seized power. Wilson was appalled. The United States, he announced, would not extend recognition to a “government of butchers.” He would “teach” Latin Americans, he added, “to elect good men.” When civil war broke out in Mexico, Wilson ordered American troops to land at Vera Cruz to prevent the arrival of weapons meant for Huerta’s forces. But to Wilson’s surprise, Mexicans greeted the marines as invaders rather than liberators. Vera Cruz, after all, was where the forces of the conquistador Hernán Cortés had landed in the sixteenth century and those of Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. More than 100 Mexicans and 19 Americans died in the fighting that followed. Huerta resigned in 1914 and fled the country. Meanwhile, various Mexican factions turned on one another. A peasant uprising in the southern part of the country, led by Emiliano Zapata, demanded land reform. The Wilson A N ERA O F I N T E RV E N T I O N ★ 741 administration offered support to Venustiano Carranza, a leader more devoted to economic modernization. In 1916, the war spilled over into the United States when several hundred men loyal to Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the leader of another peasant force, raided Columbus, New Mexico, a few miles north of the border, leading to the death of seventeen Americans. With Carranza’s approval, Wilson ordered 10,000 troops under the command of General John J. Pershing on an expedition into Mexico that unsuccessfully sought to arrest Villa. Chaos in Mexico continued—within the next few years, Zapata, Carranza, and Villa all fell victim to assassination. Mexico was a warning that it might be more difficult than Wilson assumed to use American might to reorder the internal affairs of other nations, or to apply moral certainty to foreign policy. AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR In June 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Sarajevo. (Today, Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.) This deed set in motion a chain of events that plunged Europe into the most devastating war the world had ever seen. In the years before 1914, European nations had engaged in a scramble to obtain colonial possessions overseas and had constructed a shifting series of alliances seeking military domination within Europe. In the aftermath of the assassination, Austria-Hungary, the major power in eastern Europe, declared war on Serbia. Within a little more than a month, because of the European powers’ interlocking military alliances, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan (the Allies) found themselves at war with the Central P owers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman empire, whose holdings included modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle East. German forces quickly overran Belgium and part of northern France. The war then settled into a prolonged stalemate, with bloody, indecisive battles succeeding one another. New military technologies—submarines, airplanes, machine guns, tanks, and poison g as—produced unprecedented slaughter. In one five-month battle at Verdun, in 1916, 600,000 French and German soldiers perished—nearly as many deaths as in the entire American Civil War. By the time the war ended, an estimated 10 million soldiers, and uncounted millions of civilians, had perished. The Great War, or World War I as it came to be called, dealt a severe blow to the optimism and self-confidence of Western civilization. For decades, philosophers, reformers, and politicians had hailed the triumph of reason and human progress. Despite increasingly bitter rivalries between European powers, 742 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the United States get involved in World War I? especially G ermany and Britain, as they competed for political and military dominance at home and carved up Asia and Africa into rival empires, mankind seemed to have moved beyond the time when disputes were settled by war. The conflict was also a shock to European socialist and labor movements. Of the two great ideologies that had arisen in the nineteenth century, nationalism and socialism, the former proved more powerful. Karl Marx had called on the “workers of the world” to unite against their oppressors. Instead, they marched off to kill each other. Neutrality and Preparedness As war engulfed Europe, Americans found themselves sharply divided. British-Americans sided with their nation of origin, as did many other Americans who associated Great Britain with liberty and democracy and Germany with repressive government. On the other hand, German-Americans identified with Germany. Irish-Americans bitterly opposed any aid to the British, a sentiment reinforced in 1916 when authorities in London suppressed the Easter Rebellion, an uprising demanding Irish independence, and executed several of its leaders. Immigrants from the Russian empire, especially Jews, had no desire to see the United States aid the czar’s regime. Indeed, the presence of Russia, the world’s largest despotic state, as an ally of Britain and France made it difficult to see the war as a c lear-cut battle between democracy and autocracy. Many feminists, pacifists, and social reformers, moreover, had become convinced that peace was essential to further efforts to enhance social justice at home. They lobbied vigorously against American involvement. So did large numbers of religious leaders, who viewed war as a barbaric throwback to a less Christian era. When war broke out in 1914, President Wilson proclaimed American neutrality. But as in the years preceding the War of 1812, naval warfare in Europe reverberated in the United States. Britain declared a naval blockade of Germany and began to stop American merchant vessels. Germany launched submarine warfare against ships entering and leaving British ports. In May 1915, a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania (which was carrying a large cache of arms) off the coast of Ireland, causing the death of 1,198 passengers, including 124 Americans. Wilson composed a note of protest so strong that Bryan resigned as secretary of state, fearing that the president was laying the foundation for military intervention. Bryan had advocated warning Americans not to travel on the ships of belligerents, but Wilson felt this would represent a retreat from the principle of freedom of the seas. The sinking of the Lusitania outraged American public opinion and strengthened the hand of those who believed that the United States must A M ERI CA AN D T H E G R E AT WA R ★ 743 prepare for possible entry into the war. These included longtime advocates of a stronger military establishment, like Theodore Roosevelt, and businessmen with close economic ties to Britain, the country’s leading trading partner and the recipient of more than $2 billion in wartime loans from American banks. Wilson himself had strong p ro-British sympathies and viewed Germany as “the natural foe of liberty.” By the end of 1915, he had embarked on a policy of “preparedness”—a crash program to expand the American army and navy. The Road to War In May 1916, Germany announced the suspension of submarine warfare against noncombatants. Wilson’s preparedness program seemed to have succeeded in securing the right of Americans to travel freely on the high seas without committing American forces to the conflict. “He kept us out of war” became the slogan of his campaign for reelection. With the Republican Party reunited after its split in 1912, the election proved to be one of the closest in American history. Wilson defeated Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes by only twenty-three electoral votes and about 600,000 popular votes out of more than 18 million cast. Partly because he seemed to promise not to send American soldiers to Europe, Wilson carried ten of the twelve states that had adopted woman suffrage. Without the votes of women, Wilson would not have been reelected. On January 22, 1917, Wilson called for a “peace without victory” in Europe and outlined his vision for a world order including freedom of the seas, restrictions on armaments, and self- determination for nations great and small. Almost immediately, however, Germany announced its intention to resume submarine warfare against ships sailing to or from the British Isles, and several American merchant vessels were sunk. The German government realized that its actions would probably lead Wilson to intervene, but German strategists gambled that the blockade would strangle Britain economically before the arrival of American troops. In March 1917, British spies intercepted and made public the Zimmermann Telegram, a message by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann calling on Mexico to join in a coming war against the United States and promising to help it recover territory lost in the Mexican War of 1846–1848. A revolution in Russia that same month overthrew the czar and established a constitutional government, making it more plausible to believe that the United States would be fighting on the side of democracy. On April 2, Wilson went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. “The world,” he proclaimed, “must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundation of political liberty.” The war resolution passed the Senate 82–6 and the House 373–50. 744 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the United States get involved in World War I? W O R L D WA R I : T H E W E S T E R N F R O N T NETHERLANDS Zeebrugge ENGLAND Calais Ypres Brussels Cologne . Sieg R Lys Offensive August 19– November 11, 1918 Lens BELGIUM sti mi Ar c R. mbre Sa . Lahn Coblenz Dinant Li Cambrai R Liège S e ein R. Paris Meuse-Argonne September– November 1918 FRANCE Trier Luxembourg 191 8 rR . GERMANY Saarbrücken LO RR AI N R Soissons LUXEMBOURG a Sa Rouen Sedan 1, er 1 mb ve No Aisne-Marne Offensive July 18–August 6, 1918 R. ne Ais Arg o n n e Fo re st Reims . Rh ine Somme Offensive August 19– November 11, 1918 Amiens R. Frankfurt ne Abbeville Som me R. e Arras use Me . St Lys R. R ine Rh ra . it o Ghent ft R fD r ve Düsseldorf Antwerp Nieuport Er o Dover E Troyes Épinal sge Sens s 50 miles 50 kilometers Allied victory U.S. offensives German offensives Allies Central Powers Neutral nations ALS M t s . ACE 25 25 Vo 0 R. R. 0 Strasbourg Toul e Sein be Au Melun Chartres Armistice line Stabilized front, 1915–1917 Maximum advance of Central Powers, 1918 Mulhouse Belfort SWITZERLAND After years of stalemate on the western front in World War I, the arrival of American troops in 1917 and 1918 shifted the balance of power and made possible the Allied victory. The Fourteen Points Not until the spring of 1918 did American forces arrive in Europe in large numbers. By then, the world situation had taken a dramatic turn. In November 1917, a communist revolution headed by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian government that had come to power the previous spring. Shortly thereafter, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war and published the secret treaties by which the Allies had agreed to divide up conquered territory after the w ar—an embarrassment for Wilson, who had promised a just peace. Partly to assure the country that the war was being fought for a moral cause, Wilson in January 1918 issued the Fourteen Points, the clearest statement of American war aims and of his vision of a new international order. Among the key principles were self-determination for all nations, freedom of the seas, free trade, open diplomacy (an end to secret treaties), the readjustment of colonial A M ERI CA AN D T H E G R E AT WA R ★ 745 claims with colonized people given “equal weight” in deciding their futures, and the creation of a “general association of nations” to preserve the peace. Wilson envisioned this last provision, which led to the establishment after the war of the League of Nations, as a kind of global counterpart to the regulatory commissions Progressives had created at home to maintain social harmony and prevent the powerful from exploiting the weak. Although purely an American program, not endorsed by the other Allies, the Fourteen Points established the agenda for the peace conference that followed the war. The United States threw its economic resources and manpower into the war. When American troops finally arrived in Europe, they turned the tide of battle. In the spring of 1918, they helped to repulse a German advance near Paris and by July were participating in a major Allied counteroffensive. In September, in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, American soldiers under the command of General John J. Pershing, fresh from his campaigns in Mexico, helped to push back the German army. With 1.2 million American soldiers taking part and well over 100,000 dead and wounded, Meuse-Argonne, which lasted a month and a half, was the main American engagement of the war and one of the most significant and deadliest battles in American history. It formed part of a massive Allied offensive involving British, French, and Belgian soldiers and those from overseas European possessions. With his forces in full retreat, the German kaiser abdicated on November 9. Two days later, Germany sued for peace. More than 100,000 Americans had died, a substantial number, but they were only 1 percent of the 10 million soldiers killed in the Great War. THE WAR AT HOME The Progressives’ War Looking back on American participation in the European conflict, Randolph Bourne summed up one of its lessons: “War is the health of the state.” Bourne saw the expansion of government power as a danger, but it struck most Progressives as a golden opportunity. To them, the war offered the possibility of reforming American society along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and expanding social justice. That American power could now disseminate Progressive values around the globe heightened the war’s appeal. Almost without exception, Progressive intellectuals and reformers, joined by prominent labor leaders and native-born socialists, rallied to Wilson’s support. The roster included intellectuals like John Dewey, journalists such as 746 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the United States mobilize resources and public opinion for the war effort? Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly, AFL head Samuel Gompers, socialist writers like Upton Sinclair, and prominent reformers including Florence Kelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In The New Republic, Dewey urged Progressives to recognize the “social possibilities of war.” The crisis, he wrote, offered the prospect of attacking the “immense inequality of power” within the United States, thus laying the foundation for Americans to enjoy “effective freedom.” The Wartime State Like the Civil War, World War I created, albeit temporarily, a national state with unprecedented powers and a sharply increased presence in Americans’ everyday lives. Under the Selective Service Act of May 1917, 24 million men were required to register with the draft, and the army soon swelled from 120,000 to 5 million men. The war seemed to bring into being the New Nationalist state Theodore Roosevelt and so many Progressives had desired. New federal agencies moved to regulate industry, transportation, labor relations, and agriculture. Headed by Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the War Industries Board presided over all elements of war production from the distribution of raw materials to the prices of manufactured goods. To spur efficiency, it established standardized specifications for everything from automobile tires to shoe colors (three were p ermitted—black, brown, and white). The Railroad Administration took control of the nation’s transportation system, and the Fuel Agency rationed coal and oil. The Food Administration instructed farmers on modern methods of cultivation and promoted the more efficient preparation of meals. Its director, Herbert Hoover, mobilized the shipment of American food to the war-devastated Allies, popularizing the slogan “Food will win the war.” These agencies generally saw themselves as partners of business as much as regulators. They guaranteed government suppliers a high rate of profit and encouraged cooperation among former business rivals by suspending antitrust laws. At the same time, however, the War Labor Board, which included representatives of government, industry, and the American Federation of Labor, pressed for the establishment of a minimum wage, e ight-hour workday, and the right to form unions. During the war, wages rose substantially, working conditions in many industries improved, and union membership doubled. To finance the war, corporate and individual income taxes rose enormously. By 1918, the wealthiest Americans were paying 60 percent of their income in taxes. Tens of millions of Americans answered the call to demonstrate their patriotism by purchasing Liberty bonds. Once peace arrived, the wartime state quickly withered away. But for a time, the federal government seemed well on its way to fulfilling the Progressive vision of promoting economic rationalization, industrial justice, and a sense of common national purpose. T H E WA R AT H O ME ★ 747 The Propaganda War During the Civil War, it had been left to private agencies—Union Leagues, the Loyal Publication Society, and others—to mobilize prowar public opinion. But the Wilson administration decided that patriotism was too important to leave to the private sector. Many Americans were skeptical about whether democratic America should enter a struggle between rival empires. Some vehemently opposed American participation, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the bulk of the Socialist Party, which in 1917 condemned the declaration of war as “a crime against the people of the United States” and called on “the workers of all countries” to refuse to fight. As the major national organization to oppose Wilson’s policy, the Socialist Party became a rallying point for antiwar sentiment. In mayoral elections across the country in the fall of 1917, the Socialist vote averaged 20 percent, far above the party’s previous total. In April 1917, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to explain to Americans and the world, as its director, George Creel, put it, “the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and free institutions.” Enlisting academics, journalists, artists, and advertising men, the CPI flooded the country with prowar propaganda, using every available medium from pamphlets (of which it issued 75 million) to posters, newspaper advertisements, and motion pictures. It trained and dispatched across the country 75,000 Four-Minute Men, who delivered brief standardized talks (sometimes in Italian, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages) to audiences in movie theaters, schools, and other public venues. Never before had an agency of the federal government attempted the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” in the words of young Edward Bernays, a member of Creel’s staff who would later create the modern profession of public relations. The CPI’s activities proved, one adman wrote, that it was possible to “sway the ideas of whole populations, change their habits of life, create belief, practically universal in any policy or idea.” In the 1920s, advertisers would use what they had learned to sell goods. But the CPI also set a precedent for governmental efforts to shape public opinion in later international conflicts, from World War II to the Cold War and Iraq. “The Great Cause of Freedom” The CPI couched its appeal in the Progressive language of social cooperation and expanded democracy. Abroad, this meant a peace based on the principle of national self-determination. At home, it meant improving “industrial 748 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the United States mobilize resources and public opinion for the war effort? All combatants issued propaganda posters. The American poster uses an image of the Statue of Liberty to sell war bonds. The German one, satirically entitled We Are Barbarians, refutes the charge of barbarism hurled at Germans by the Allies. It relates that Germany outstrips England and France in Nobel Prizes, provision for the elderly, book publication, education, and literacy. democracy.” A Progressive journalist, Creel believed the war would accelerate the movement toward solving the “age-old problems of poverty, inequality, oppression, and unhappiness.” He took to heart a warning from historian Carl Becker that a simple contrast between German tyranny and American democracy would not seem plausible to the average worker: “You talk to him of our ideals of liberty and he thinks of the shameless exploitation of labor and of the ridiculous gulf between wealth and poverty.” CPI pamphlets foresaw a postwar society complete with a “universal e ight-hour day” and a living wage for all. While “democracy” served as the key term of wartime mobilization, “freedom” also took on new significance. The war, a CPI advertisement proclaimed, was being fought in “the great cause of freedom.” Thousands of persons, often draftees, were enlisted to pose in giant human tableaus representing symbols of liberty. One living representation of the Liberty Bell at Fort Dix, New Jersey, included 25,000 people. The most common visual image in wartime propaganda was the Statue of Liberty, employed especially to rally support among immigrants. “You came here seeking Freedom,” stated a caption on one Statue T H E WA R AT H O ME ★ 749 of Liberty poster. “You must now help preserve it.” Buying Liberty bonds became a demonstration of patriotism. Wilson’s speeches cast the United States as a land of liberty fighting alongside a “concert of free people” to secure self-determination for the oppressed peoples of the world. The idea of freedom, it seems, requires an antithesis, and the CPI found one in the German kaiser and, more generally, the German nation and people. Government propaganda whipped up hatred of the wartime foe by portraying it as a nation of barbaric Huns. The Coming of Woman Suffrage The enlistment of “democracy” and “freedom” as ideological war weapons inevitably inspired demands for their expansion at home. In 1916, Wilson had cautiously endorsed votes for women. America’s entry into the war threatened to tear the suffrage movement apart, since many advocates had been associated with opposition to American involvement. Indeed, among those who voted against the declaration of war was the first woman member of Congress, the staunch pacifist Jeannette Rankin of Montana. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she said. Although defeated in her reelection bid in 1918, Rankin would return to Congress in 1940. She became the only member to oppose the declaration of war against Japan in 1941, which ended her political career. In 1968, at the age of e ighty-five, Rankin took part in a giant march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. As during the Civil War, however, most leaders of woman suffrage organizations enthusiastically enlisted in the effort. Women sold war bonds, o rganized patriotic rallies, and went to work in war production jobs. Some 22,000 served as clerical workers and nurses with American forces in Europe. Many believed wartime service would earn them equal rights at home. At the same time, a new generation of college-educated activists, organized in the National Woman’s Party, pressed for the right to vote with militant tactics many older suffrage advocates found scandalous. The party’s leader, Alice Paul, had studied in England between 1907 and 1910 when the British suffrage movement adopted a strategy that included arrests, imprisonments, and vigorous denunciations of a m ale-dominated political system. How could the country fight for democracy abroad, Paul asked, while denying it to women at home? She compared Wilson to the kaiser, and a group of her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, resulting in a s even-month prison sentence. When they began a hunger strike, the prisoners were force-fed. The combination of women’s patriotic service and widespread outrage over the mistreatment of Paul and her fellow prisoners pushed the administration toward full-fledged support for woman suffrage. “We have made partners of the women in this war,” Wilson proclaimed. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of 750 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the United States mobilize resources and public opinion for the war effort? suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” In 1920, the long struggle ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment barring states from using sex as a qualification for the suffrage. The United States became the twenty-seventh country to allow women to vote. Prohibition The war gave a powerful impulse to other campaigns that had engaged the energies of many women in the Progressive era. Ironically, efforts to stamp out prostitution and protect soldiers from venereal disease led the government to distribute birth-control information and devices—the very action for which Margaret Sanger had recently been jailed, as noted in the previous chapter. Prohibition, a movement inherited from the nineteenth century that had gained new strength and militancy in Progressive America, finally achieved national success during the war. Numerous impulses flowed into the renewed P R O H I B I T I O N , 1 9 1 5 : C O U N T I E S A N D S TAT E S T H AT BANNED LIQUOR BEFORE THE EIGHTEENTH A M E N D M E N T ( R AT I F I E D 1 9 1 9 , R E P E A L E D 1 9 3 3 ) CANADA 0 WA 200 0 MT ME VT MN ID WI SD WY MI UT CO PA IL KS CA OK NM MO VA KY NC TN SC AR AL GA A t l a nt i c O ce a n LA Pacific Ocean MEXICO RI NJ MD DE WV MS TX OH IN NH MA CT NY IA NE NV Wet counties Dry counties 400 miles 400 kilometers ND OR AZ 200 FL Gulf of Mexico In the early years of the twentieth century, many states and localities in the South and West banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. (“Wet” counties allowed alcoholic beverages, “dry” counties banned them.) Prohibition became national with the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. T H E WA R AT H O ME ★ 751 campaign to ban intoxicating liquor. Employers hoped it would create a more disciplined labor force. Urban reformers believed that it would promote a more orderly city environment and undermine urban political machines that used saloons as places to organize. Women reformers hoped Prohibition would protect wives and children from husbands who engaged in domestic violence when drunk or who squandered their wages at saloons. Many native-born Protestants saw Prohibition as a way of imposing “American” values on immigrants. Like the suffrage movement, Prohibitionists first concentrated on state campaigns. By 1915, they had won victories in eighteen southern and midwestern states where the immigrant population was small and Protestant denominations like Baptists and Methodists strongly opposed drinking. But like the suffrage movement, Prohibitionists came to see national legislation as their best strategy. The war gave them added ammunition. Many prominent breweries were owned by G erman-Americans, making beer seem unpatriotic. The Food Administration insisted that grain must be used to p roduce food, not distilled into beer and liquor. In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. It was ratified by the states in 1919 and went into effect at the beginning of 1920. Liberty in Wartime World War I raised questions already glimpsed during the Civil War that would trouble the nation again during the McCarthy era and in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001: What is the balance between security and freedom? Does the Constitution protect citizens’ rights during wartime? Should dissent be equated with lack of patriotism? The conflict demonstrated that during a war, traditional civil liberties are likely to come under severe pressure. In 1917, Randolph Bourne ridiculed Progressives who believed they could mold the war according to their own “liberal purposes.” The conflict, he predicted, would empower not reformers but the “least democratic forces in American life.” The accuracy of Bourne’s prediction soon become apparent. Despite the administration’s idealistic language of democracy and freedom, the war inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known. Perhaps the very nobility of wartime rhetoric contributed to the massive suppression of dissent. For in the eyes of Wilson and many of his supporters, America’s goals were so virtuous that disagreement could only reflect treason to the country’s values. The Espionage and Sedition Acts For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the federal government enacted laws to restrict freedom of speech. The Espionage Act of 1917 752 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the United States mobilize resources and public opinion for the war effort? prohibited not only spying and interfering with the draft but also “false statements” that might impede military success. The postmaster general barred from the mails numerous newspapers and magazines critical of the administration. The victims ranged from virtually the entire socialist press and many foreign-language publications to The Jeffersonian, a newspaper owned by ex-Populist leader Tom Watson, which criticized the draft as a violation of states’ rights. In 1918, the Sedition Act made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that intended to cast “contempt, scorn, or disrepute” on the “form of government,” or that advocated interference with the war effort. The government charged more than 2,000 persons with violating these laws. Over half were convicted. A court sentenced Ohio farmer John White to twenty-one months in prison for saying that the murder of innocent women and children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States had done in the Philippines in the war of 1899–1903. The most prominent victim was Eugene V. Debs, convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for delivering an antiwar speech. Before his sentencing, Debs gave the court a lesson in the history of American freedom, tracing the tradition of dissent from Thomas Paine to the abolitionists, and pointing out that the nation had never engaged in a war without internal opposition. Germany sent socialist leader Karl Liebknecht to prison for four years for opposing the war; in the United States, Debs’s sentence was ten years. After the war’s end, Wilson rejected the advice of his attorney general that he commute Debs’s sentence. Debs ran for president while still in prison in 1920 and received 900,000 votes. It was left to Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, to release Debs from prison in 1921. Coercive Patriotism Even more extreme repression took place at the hands of state governments and private groups. Americans had long displayed the flag (and used it in advertisements for everything from tobacco products to variety shows). But during World War I, attitudes toward the American flag became a test of patriotism. Persons suspected of disloyalty were forced to kiss the flag in public; those who made statements critical of the flag could be imprisoned. During the war, thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display of red or black flags (symbols, respectively, of communism and anarchism), and twenty-three outlawed a newly created offense, “criminal syndicalism,” the advocacy of unlawful acts to accomplish political change or “a change in industrial ownership.” “Who is the real patriot?” Emma Goldman asked while on trial for conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act. She answered, those who “love America with open eyes,” who were not blind to “the wrongs committed in the name of patriotism.” But from the federal government to local authorities and private groups, patriotism came to be equated with support for the government, the T H E WA R AT H O ME ★ 753 war, and the American economic system, while antiwar sentiment, labor radicalism, and sympathy for the Russian Revolution became “un-American.” Local authorities formally investigated residents who failed to subscribe to Liberty Loans. Throughout the country, schools revised their course offerings to ensure their patriotism and required teachers to sign loyalty oaths. The 250,000 members of the newly formed American Protective League (APL) helped the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war by spying on their neighbors and carrying out “slacker raids” in which thousands of men were stopped on the streets of major cities and required to produce draft registration cards. Many private groups seized upon the Florine Stettheimer’s New York/Liberty, painted atmosphere of repression as a weapon in 1918, depicts the Statue of Liberty, waragainst domestic opponents. Employships, and airplanes in an exuberant tribute to ers cooperated with the government in New York City and to the idea of freedom in the crushing the Industrial Workers of the wake of World War I. World (IWW), a move long demanded by business interests. In July 1917, vigilantes in Bisbee, Arizona, rounded up some 1,200 striking copper miners and their sympathizers, herded them into railroad boxcars, and transported them into the desert, where they were abandoned. Few ever returned to Bisbee. In August, a crowd in Butte, Montana, lynched IWW leader Frank Little. The following month, operating under one of the broadest warrants in American history, federal agents swooped down on IWW offices throughout the country, arresting hundreds of leaders and seizing files and publications. The war experience, commented Walter Lippmann, demonstrated “that the traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation.” Yet while some Progressives protested individual excesses, most failed to speak out against the broad suppression of freedom of expression. Civil liberties, by and large, had never been a major concern of Progressives, who had always viewed the national state as the embodiment of democratic purpose and insisted that freedom flowed from participating in the life of society, not standing in opposition. Strong believers in the use of national power to improve social conditions, 754 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the war affect race relations in the United States? Progressives found themselves ill prepared to develop a defense of minority rights against majority or governmental tyranny. From the AFL to New Republic intellectuals, moreover, supporters of the war saw the elimination of socialists and alien radicals as a necessary prelude to the integration of labor and immigrants into an ordered society, an outcome they hoped would emerge from the war. WHO IS AN AMERICAN? In many respects, Progressivism was a precursor to major developments of the twentieth century—the New Deal, the Great Society, the socially active state. But in accepting the idea of “race” as a permanent, defining characteristic of individuals and social groups, Progressives bore more resemblance to nineteenth-century thinkers than to later twentieth-century liberals, with whom they are sometimes compared. The “Race Problem” Even before American participation in World War I, what contemporaries called the “race problem”—the tensions that arose from the country’s increasing ethnic diversity—had become a major subject of public concern. “Race” referred to far more than b lack-white relations. The Dictionary of Races of Peoples, published in 1911 by the U.S. Immigration Commission, listed no fewer than forty-five immigrant “races,” each supposedly with its own inborn characteristics. They ranged from A nglo-Saxons at the top down to Hebrews, Northern Italians, and, lowest of all, Southern Italians—supposedly violent, undisciplined, and incapable of assimilation. Popular best-sellers like The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916 by Madison Grant, president of the New York Zoological Society, warned that the influx of new immigrants and the low birthrate of native white women threatened the foundations of American civilization. The new science of eugenics, which studied the alleged mental characteristics of different races, gave a nti-immigrant sentiment an air of professional expertise. If democracy could not flourish in the face of vast inequalities of economic power, neither, most Progressives believed, could it survive in a nation permanently divided along racial and ethnic lines. Americanization and Pluralism Somehow, the very nationalization of politics and economic life served to heighten awareness of ethnic and racial difference and spurred demands for “Americanization”—the creation of a more homogeneous national culture. A W HO I S A N A ME R I C A N ? ★ 755 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Woodrow Wilson, War Message to Congress (1917) More than any other individual in the early twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson articulated a new vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. In his message to a special session of Congress on April 2, 1917, Wilson asked for a declaration of war. In his most celebrated sentence, Wilson declared, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are. . . . Our object . . . is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles. . . . The menace to peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. . . . We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. . . . If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression. . . . It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our h earts—for democracy, . . . for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. 756 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I From Eugene V. Debs, Speech to the Jury before Sentencing under the Espionage Act (1918) Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was arrested for delivering an antiwar speech and convicted of violating the Espionage Act. In his speech to the jury, he defended the right of dissent in wartime. Gentlemen, you have heard the report of my speech at Canton [Ohio] on June 16, and I submit that there is not a word in that speech to warrant the charges set out in the indictment. . . . In what I had to say there my purpose was to have the people understand something about the social system in which we live and to prepare them to change this system by perfectly peaceable and orderly means into what I, as a Socialist, conceive to be a real democracy. . . . I have never advocated violence in any form. I have always believed in education, in intelligence, in enlightenment; and I have always made my appeal to the reason and to the conscience of the people. In every age there have been a few heroic souls who have been in advance of their time, who have been misunderstood, maligned, persecuted, sometimes put to death. . . . Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and their compeers were the rebels of their day. . . . But they had the moral courage to be true to their convictions. . . . William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Elizabeth Cady Stanton . . . and other leaders of the abolition movement who were regarded as public enemies and treated accordingly, were true to their faith and stood their ground. . . . You are now teaching your children to revere their memories, while all of their detractors are in oblivion. . . . The war of 1812 was opposed and condemned by some of the most influential citizens; the M exican War was vehemently opposed and bitterly denounced, even after the war had been declared and was in progress, by Abraham L incoln, Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster. . . . They were not indicted; they were not charged with treason. . . . Isn’t it strange that we Socialists stand almost alone today in upholding and QU E STIONS defending the Constitution of the United 1. What does Wilson think is the greatest States? The revolutionary fathers . . . threat to freedom in the world? understood that free speech, a free press and the right of free assemblage by the 2. Why does Debs relate the history of wartime dissent in the United States? people were fundamental principles in democratic government. . . . I believe in 3. Does anything in Wilson’s speech offer a the right of free speech, in war as well as harbinger of the extreme repression of free in peace. speech that occurred during World War I? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 757 1908 play by the Jewish immigrant writer Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, gave a popular name to the process by which newcomers were supposed to merge their identity into existing American nationality. Public and private groups of all kinds—including educators, employers, labor leaders, social reformers, and public officials—took up the task of Americanizing new immigrants. The Ford Motor Company’s famed sociological department entered the homes of immigrant workers to evaluate their clothing, furniture, and food preferences and enrolled them in E nglish-language courses. Ford fired those who failed to adapt to American standards after a reasonable period of time. Americanization programs often targeted women as the bearers and transmitters of culture. In Los Angeles, teachers and religious missionaries worked to teach English to Mexican-American women so that they could then assimilate American values. Fearful that adult newcomers remained too stuck in their Old World ways, public schools paid great attention to A mericanizing immigrants’ children. The challenge facing schools, wrote one educator, was “to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government.” A minority of Progressives questioned Americanization efforts and insisted on respect for immigrant subcultures. At Hull House, teachers offered English-language instruction but also encouraged immigrants to value their European heritage. Probably the most penetrating critique issued from the pen of Randolph Bourne, whose 1916 essay “Trans-National America” exposed the fundamental flaw in the Americanization model. “There is no distinctive American culture,” Bourne pointed out. Interaction between individuals and groups had produced the nation’s music, poetry, and other cultural expressions. Bourne envisioned a democratic, cosmopolitan society in which immigrants and natives alike submerged their group identities in a new “trans-national” culture. With President Wilson declaring that some Americans “born under foreign flags” were guilty of “disloyalty . . . and must be absolutely crushed,” the federal and state governments demanded that immigrants demonstrate their unwavering devotion to the United States. The Committee on Public Information renamed the Fourth of July, 1918, Loyalty Day and asked ethnic groups to participate in patriotic pageants. New York City’s celebration included a procession of 75,000 persons with dozens of floats and presentations linking immigrants with the war effort and highlighting their contributions to American society. Leaders of ethnic groups that had suffered discrimination saw the war as an opportunity to gain greater rights. Prominent Jewish leaders promoted enlistment and expressions of loyalty. The C hinese-American press insisted that even those born abroad and barred from citizenship should register for the draft, to “bring honor to the people of our race.” 758 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the war affect race relations in the United States? The A nti-German Crusade erman- G Americans bore the brunt of forced Americanization. The first wave of German immigrants had arrived before the Civil War. By 1914, German-Americans numbered nearly 9 million, including immigrants and persons of German parentage. They had created thriving ethnic institutions including clubs, sports associations, schools, and theaters. On the eve of the war, many Americans admired German traditions in literature, music, and philosophy, and one-quarter of all the high school students in the country studied the German language. But after American entry into the war, the use of German and expressions of German culture became a target of prowar organizations. In Iowa, Governor William L. Harding issued a proclamation requiring that all oral communication in schools, public places, and over the telephone be conducted in English. Freedom of speech, he declared, did not include “the right to use a language other than the language of the country.” By 1919, the vast majority of the states had enacted laws restricting the teaching of foreign languages. Popular words of German origin were changed: “hamburger” became “liberty sandwich,” and “sauerkraut” “liberty cabbage.” Many communities banned the playing of German music. The government jailed Karl Muck, the director of the Boston Symphony and a Swiss citizen, as an enemy alien after he insisted on including the works of German composers like Beethoven in his concerts. The war dealt a crushing blow to German-American culture. By 1920, the number of G erman-language newspapers had been reduced to 276 (one-third the number twenty years earlier), and only 1 percent of high school pupils still studied German. The Census of 1920 reported a 25 percent drop in the number of Americans admitting to having been born in Germany. Toward Immigration Restriction Even as Americanization programs sought to assimilate immigrants into American society, the war strengthened the conviction that certain kinds of undesirable persons ought to be excluded altogether. The new immigrants, one advocate of restriction declared, appreciated the values of democracy and freedom far less than “the Anglo-Saxon,” as evidenced by their attraction to “extreme political doctrines” like anarchism and socialism. Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman introduced the term “IQ” (intelligence quotient) in 1916, claiming that this single number could measure an individual’s mental capacity. Intelligence tests administered to recruits by the army seemed to confirm scientifically that blacks and the new immigrants stood far below native white Protestants on the IQ scale, further spurring demands for immigration restriction. W HO I S A N A ME R I C A N ? ★ 759 In 1917, over Wilson’s veto, Congress required that immigrants be literate in English or another language. The war accelerated other efforts to upgrade the American population. Some were inspired by the idea of improving the human race by discouraging reproduction among less “desirable” persons. Indiana in 1907 had passed a law authorizing doctors to sterilize insane and “feeble-minded” inmates in mental institutions so that they would not pass their “defective” genes on to children. Numerous other states now followed suit. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these laws. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion included the famous statement, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By the time the practice ended in the 1960s, some 63,000 persons had been involuntarily sterilized. Groups Apart: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian-Americans No matter how coercive, Americanization programs assumed that European immigrants and especially their children could eventually adjust to the conditions of American life, embrace American ideals, and become productive citizens enjoying the full blessings of American freedom. This assumption did not apply to n on-white immigrants or to blacks. Although the m elting-pot idea envisioned that newcomers from Europe would leave their ethnic enclaves and join the American mainstream, non-whites confronted ever-present boundaries of exclusion. The war led to further growth of the Southwest’s Mexican population. Wartime demand for labor from the area’s mine owners and large farmers led the government to exempt Mexicans temporarily from the literacy test enacted in 1917. Mexicans were legally classified as white, and many Progressive reformers viewed the growing Mexican population as candidates for Americanization. Teachers and religious missionaries sought to instruct them in English, convert them to Protestantism, and in other ways promote their assimilation into the mainstream culture. Yet public officials in the Southwest treated them as a group apart. Segregation, by law and custom, was common in schools, hospitals, theaters, and other institutions in states with significant Mexican populations. By 1920, nearly all Mexican children in California and the Southwest were educated in their own schools or classrooms. Phoenix, Arizona, established separate public schools for Indians, Mexicans, blacks, and whites. Although in far smaller numbers than blacks, Mexican-Americans also suffered lynchings—over 200 between 1880 and 1930. Discrimination led to the formation of La Grán Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección, which aimed to improve the conditions of Mexicans in the United States and “to strike back at the hatred of some bad sons of Uncle Sam who believe themselves better than the Mexicans.” 760 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the war affect race relations in the United States? Puerto Ricans also occupied an ambiguous position within American society. On the eve of American entry into World War I, Congress terminated the status “citizen of Puerto Rico” and conferred American citizenship on residents of the island. The aim was to dampen support for Puerto Rican independence and to strengthen the American hold on a strategic outpost in the Caribbean. The change did not grant islanders the right to vote for president, or representation in Congress. Puerto Rican men, nonetheless, were subject to the draft and fought overseas. José de Diego, the Speaker of the House of the island’s legislature, wrote the president in 1917 asking that Puerto Rico be granted the democracy the United States was fighting for in Europe. Even more restrictive were policies toward Asian-Americans. In 1906, the San Francisco school board ordered all Asian students confined to a single public school. When the Japanese government protested, president Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the city to rescind the order. He then negotiated the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 whereby Japan agreed to end migration to the United States except for the wives and children of men already in the country. In 1913, California barred all aliens incapable of becoming naturalized citizens (that is, all Asians) from owning or leasing land. The Color Line By far the largest n on-white group, African-Americans were excluded from nearly every Progressive definition of freedom described in Chapter 18. After their disenfranchisement in the South, few could participate in American democracy. Barred from joining most unions and from skilled employment, black workers had little access to “industrial freedom.” A majority of adult black women worked outside the home, but for wages that offered no hope of independence. Predominantly domestic and agricultural workers, they remained unaffected by the era’s laws regulating the hours and conditions of female labor. Nor could blacks, the majority desperately poor, participate fully in the emerging consumer economy, either as employees in the new department stores (except as janitors and cleaning women) or as purchasers of the consumer goods now flooding the marketplace. Progressive intellectuals, social scientists, labor reformers, and suffrage advocates displayed a remarkable indifference to the black condition. Israel Zangwill did not include blacks in the m elting-pot idea popularized by his Broadway play. Walter Weyl waited until the last fifteen pages of The New Democracy to introduce the “race problem.” His comment, quoted in the previous chapter, that the chief obstacles to freedom were economic, not political, revealed little appreciation of how the denial of voting rights underpinned the comprehensive system of inequality to which southern blacks were subjected. W HO I S A N A ME R I C A N ? ★ 761 Most settlement- house reformers accepted segregation as natural and e quitable, assuming there should be white settlements for white neighborhoods and black settlements for black. White leaders of the woman suffrage movement said little about black disenfranchisement. In the South, members of upper-class white women’s clubs sometimes raised funds for black schools and community centers. But suffrage leaders insisted that the vote was a racial entitlement, a “badge and synonym of freedom,” in the words of Rebecca Felton of Georgia, that should not be denied to “free-born white women.” During Reconstruction, women had been denied constitutional recognition because it was “the Negro’s hour.” Now, World War I’s “woman’s hour” excluded blacks. The amendment that achieved woman suffrage left the states free to limit voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Living in the South, the vast majority of the country’s black women still could not vote. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race The Progressive presidents shared prevailing attitudes concerning blacks. Theodore Roosevelt shocked white opinion by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House and by appointing a number of blacks to federal offices. But in 1906, when a small group of black soldiers shot off their guns in Brownsville, Texas, killing one resident, and none of their fellows would name them, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of three black companies—156 men in all, including six winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Roosevelt’s ingrained belief in Anglo-Saxon racial destiny (he called Indians “savages” and blacks “wholly unfit for the suffrage”) did nothing to lessen Progressive intellectuals’ enthusiasm for his New Nationalism. Even Jane Addams, one of the few Progressives to take a strong interest in black rights and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), went along when the Progressive Party convention of 1912 rejected a civil rights plank in its platform and barred black delegates from the South. Woodrow Wilson, a native of Virginia, could speak without irony of the South’s “genuine representative government” and its exalted “standards of liberty.” His administration imposed racial segregation in federal departments in Washington, D.C., and dismissed numerous black federal employees. Wilson allowed D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan as the defender of white civilization during Reconstruction, to have its premiere at the White House in 1915. “Have you a ‘new freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your A frican-American fellow citizens?” William Monroe Trotter, the militant black editor of the Boston Guardian and founder of the all-black National Equal Rights League, asked the president. 762 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the war affect race relations in the United States? Blacks subject to disenfranchisement and segregation were understandably skeptical of the nation’s claim to embody freedom and fully appreciated the ways the symbols of liberty could coexist with brutal racial violence. In one of hundreds of lynchings during the Progressive era, a white mob in Springfield, Missouri, in 1906 falsely accused three black men of rape, hanged them from an electric light pole, and burned their bodies in a public orgy of violence. Atop the pole stood a replica of the Statue of Liberty. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revival of Black Protest Black leaders struggled to find a strategy to rekindle the national commitA poster advertising the 1915 film The Birth ment to equality that had flickered of a Nation, which had its premiere at Woodbrightly, if briefly, during Reconstruc- row Wilson’s White House. The movie glorified tion. No one thought more deeply, or the Ku Klux Klan and depicted blacks during over so long a period, about the black Reconstruction as unworthy of participation in government and a danger to white womanhood. condition and the challenge it posed to American democracy than the scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, and educated at Fisk and Harvard universities, Du Bois lived to his ninety-fifth year. The unifying theme of his career was Du Bois’s effort to reconcile the contradiction between what he called “American freedom for whites and the continuing subjection of Negroes.” His book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) issued a clarion call for blacks dissatisfied with the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington to press for equal rights. Du Bois believed that educated African-Americans like himself—the “talented tenth” of the black community—must use their education and training to challenge inequality. In some ways, Du Bois was a typical Progressive who believed that investigation, exposure, and education would lead to solutions for social problems. As a professor at Atlanta University, he projected a grandiose plan for decades of scholarly study of black life in order to make the country aware of racism and point the way toward its elimination. But he also understood the necessity of political action. W HO I S A N A ME R I C A N ? ★ 763 In 1905, Du Bois gathered a group of black leaders at Niagara Falls (meeting on the Canadian side since no American hotel would provide accommodations) and organized the Niagara movement, which sought to reinvigorate the abolitionist tradition. “We claim for ourselves,” Du Bois wrote in the group’s manifesto, “every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.” The Declaration of Principles adopted at Niagara Falls called for restoring to blacks the right to vote, an end to racial segregation, and complete equality in economic and educational opportunity. These would remain the cornerstones of the black struggle for racial justice for decades to come. Four years later, Du Bois joined with a group of mostly white reformers, shocked by a lynching in Springfield, Illinois (Lincoln’s adult home), to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP, as it was known, launched a long struggle for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The NAACP’s legal strategy won a few victories. In Bailey v. Alabama (1911), the Supreme Court overturned southern “peonage” laws that made it a crime for sharecroppers to break their labor contracts. Six years later, it ruled unconstitutional a Louisville zoning regulation excluding blacks from living in certain parts of the city (primarily because it interfered with whites’ right to sell their property as they saw fit). Overall, however, the Progressive era witnessed virtually no progress toward racial justice. Closing Ranks Among black Americans, the wartime language of freedom inspired hopes for a radical change in the country’s racial system. With the notable exception of William Monroe Trotter, most black leaders saw American participation in the war as an opportunity to make real the promise of freedom. To Trotter, much-publicized G erman atrocities were no worse than American lynchings; rather than making the world safe for democracy, the government should worry about “making the South safe for the Negroes.” Yet the black press rallied to the war. Du Bois himself, in widely reprinted editorials, called on African-Americans to enlist in the army to help “make our own America a real land of the free.” Black participation in the Civil War had helped to secure the destruction of slavery and the achievement of citizenship. But during World War I, closing ranks did not bring significant gains. The navy barred blacks entirely, and the segregated army confined most of the 400,000 blacks who served in the war to supply units rather than combat. Wilson feared, as he noted in his diary, that the overseas experience would “go to their heads.” And the U.S. Army campaigned 764 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I How did the war affect race relations in the United States? strenuously to persuade the French not to treat black soldiers as equals—not to eat or socialize with them, or even shake their hands. Contact with African colonial soldiers fighting alongside the British and French did widen the horizons of black American soldiers. But while colonial troops marched in the victory parade in Paris, the Wilson administration did not allow black Americans to participate. The Great Migration and the “Promised Land” Nonetheless, the war unleashed social changes that altered the contours of American race relations. The combination of increased wartime production and a drastic falloff in immigration from Europe once war broke out opened thousands of industrial jobs to black laborers for the first time, inspiring a large-scale migration from South to North. On the eve of World War I, 90 percent of the A frican-American population still lived in the South. Most northern cities had tiny black populations, and domestic and service work still predominated among both black men and black women in the North. But between 1910 and 1920, half a million blacks left the South. The black population of Chicago more than doubled, New York City’s rose 66 percent, and smaller industrial cities like Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton showed similar gains. Many motives sustained the Great Migration—higher wages in northern factories than were available in the South (even if blacks remained confined to menial and unskilled positions), opportunities for educating their children, escape from the threat of lynching, and the prospect of exercising the right to vote. Migrants spoke of a Second Emancipation, of “crossing over Jordan,” and of leaving the realm of pharaoh for the Promised Land. One group from MisTable 19.1 The Great Migration sissippi stopped to sing, “I am bound for the land of Canaan,” after their train Black Black Percent Population, Population, Increase crossed the Ohio River into the North. City 1910 1920 The black migrants, mostly young New York 91,709 152,467 66.3% men and women, carried with them “a new vision of opportunity, of social Philadelphia 84,459 134,229 58.9 and economic freedom,” as Alain Chicago 44,103 109,458 148.2 Locke explained in the preface to his influential book The New Negro (1925). St. Louis 43,960 69,854 58.9 Yet the migrants encountered vast Detroit 5,741 40,838 611.3 disappointments—severely restricted Pittsburgh 25,623 37,725 47.2 employment opportunities, exclusion from unions, rigid housing segregation, Cleveland 8,448 34,451 307.8 and outbreaks of violence that made it W HO I S A N A ME R I C A N ? ★ 765 One of a series of paintings by the black artist Jacob Lawrence called The Migration Series, inspired by the massive movement of A frican-Americans to the North during and after World War I. For each, Lawrence composed a brief title, in this case, “In the North the Negro had better educational facilities.” clear that no region of the country was free from racial hostility. More white southerners than blacks moved north during the war, often with similar economic aspirations. But the new black presence, coupled with demands for change inspired by the war, created a racial tinderbox that needed only an incident to trigger an explosion. Racial Violence, North and South Dozens of blacks were killed during a 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, where employers had recruited black workers in an attempt to weaken unions (most of which excluded blacks from membership). In 1919, more than 250 persons died in riots in the urban North. Most notable was the violence in Chicago, touched off by the drowning by white bathers of a black teenager who accidentally crossed the unofficial dividing line between black and white beaches on Lake Michigan. The riot that followed raged for five days and involved pitched battles between the races throughout the city. By the time the National Guard restored order, 38 persons had been killed and more than 500 injured. 766 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? Violence was not confined to the North. In the year after the war ended, seventy-six persons were lynched in the South, including several returning black veterans wearing their uniforms. In Phillips County, Arkansas, attacks on striking black sharecroppers by armed white vigilantes left as many as 200 persons dead and required the intervention of the army to restore order. The worst race riot in American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, when more than 300 blacks were killed and over 10,000 left homeless after a white mob, including police and National Guardsmen, burned an all-black section of the city to the ground. The Tulsa riot erupted after a group of black veterans tried to prevent the lynching of a youth who had accidentally tripped and fallen on a white female elevator operator, causing rumors of rape to sweep the city. The Rise of Garveyism World War I kindled a new spirit of militancy. The East St. Louis riot of 1917 inspired a widely publicized Silent Protest Parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue in which 10,000 blacks silently carried placards reading, “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” In the new densely populated black ghettos of the North, widespread support emerged for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement for African independence and black self-reliance launched by Marcus Garvey, a recent immigrant from Jamaica. Freedom for Garveyites meant national self- determination. Blacks, they insisted, should enjoy the same internationally recognized identity enjoyed by other peoples in the aftermath of the war. “Everywhere we hear the cry of freedom,” Garvey proclaimed in 1921. “We desire a freedom that will lift us to the common standard of all men, . . . freedom that will give us a chance and opportunity to rise to the fullest of our ambition and that we cannot get in countries where other men rule and dominate.” Du Bois and other established black leaders viewed Garvey as little more than a demagogue. They applauded when the government deported him after a conviction for mail fraud. But the massive following his movement achieved testified to the sense of betrayal that had been kindled in black communities during and after the war. 19 19 A Worldwide Upsurge The combination of militant hopes for social change and disappointment with the war’s outcome was evident far beyond the black community. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union), as Russia had been renamed 1 9 1 9 ★ 767 after the revolution, Lenin’s government had nationalized landholdings, banks, and factories and proclaimed the socialist dream of a workers’ government. The Russian Revolution and the democratic aspirations unleashed by World War I sent tremors of hope and fear throughout the world. Like 1848 and, in the future, 1968, 1919 was a year of worldwide social and political upheaval. Inspired by Lenin’s call for revolution, communist-led governments came to power in Bavaria (a part of Germany) and Hungary. General strikes demanding the fulfillment of wartime promises of “industrial democracy” took place in Belfast, Glasgow, and Winnipeg. In Spain, anarchist peasants began seizing land. Crowds in India challenged British rule, and nationalist movements in other colonies demanded independence. “We are living and shall live all our lives in a revolutionary world,” wrote Walter Lippmann. The worldwide revolutionary upsurge produced a countervailing mobilization by opponents of radical change. Even as they fought the Germans, the Allies viewed the Soviet government as a dire threat and attempted to overturn it. In the summer of 1918, Allied expeditionary forces—British, French, Japanese, and A mericans—landed in Russia to aid Lenin’s opponents in the civil war that had engulfed the country. The last of them did not leave until 1920. Wilson’s policies toward the Soviet Union revealed the contradictions within the liberal internationalist vision. On the one hand, in keeping with the principles of the Fourteen Points and its goal of a worldwide economic open door, Wilson hoped to foster trade with the new government. On the other, fear of communism as a source of international instability and a threat to private property inspired military intervention in Russia. The Allies did not invite the Soviet Union to the Versailles peace conference, and Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to Lenin’s government. The Soviet regime survived, but in the rest of the world the tide of change receded. By the fall, the mass strikes had been suppressed and conservative governments had been installed in central Europe. Anticommunism would remain a pillar of t wentieth-century American foreign policy. Upheaval in America In the United States, 1919 also brought unprecedented turmoil. It seemed all the more disorienting for occurring in the midst of a worldwide flu epidemic that killed over 20 million persons, including nearly 700,000 Americans. Racial violence, as noted above, was widespread. In June, bombs exploded at the homes of prominent Americans, including the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, who escaped uninjured. Among aggrieved American workers, wartime language linking patriotism with democracy and freedom inspired hopes that an 768 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? era of social justice and economic empowerment was at hand. In 1917, Wilson had told the AFL, “While we are fighting for freedom, we must see to it among other things that labor is free.” Labor took him seriously—more seriously, it seems, than Wilson intended. The government, as one machinist put it, had “proclaimed to the World that the freedom and democracy we are fighting for shall be practiced in the industries of America.” By the war’s end, many Americans believed that the country stood on the verge of what Herbert Hoover called “a new industrial order.” Sidney Hillman, leader of the garment workers’ union, was one of those caught up in the utopian dreams inspired by the war and reinforced by the Russian Revolution. “One can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer,” he wrote. “Labor will rule and the World will be free.” In 1919, more than 4 million workers engaged in strikes— the greatest wave of labor unrest in American history. There were walkouts, among many others, by textile workers, telephone operators, and Broadway actors. Throughout the country, workers appropriated the imagery and rhetoric of the war, parading in army uniforms with Liberty buttons, denouncing their employers as “kaisers,” and demanding “freedom in the workplace.” They were met by an unprecedented mobilization of employers, government, and private patriotic organizations. The strike wave began in January 1919 in Seattle, where a walkout of shipyard workers mushroomed into a general strike that for once united AFL unions and the IWW. For five days, a committee of labor leaders oversaw city services, until federal troops arrived to end the strike. In September, Boston policemen struck for higher wages and shorter working hours. Declaring “there is no right to strike against the public safety,” Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge called out the National Guard to patrol the city and fired the entire police force. In the nation’s coalfields, a company manager observed, wartime propaganda had raised unrealistic expectations among workers, who took the promise of “an actual emancipation” too “literally.” When the war ended, miners demanded an end to company absolutism. Their strike was ended by a court injunction obtained by Attorney General Palmer. The Great Steel Strike The wartime rhetoric of economic democracy and freedom helped to inspire the era’s greatest labor uprising, the 1919 steel strike. Centered in Chicago, it united some 365,000 mostly immigrant workers in demands for union recognition, higher wages, and an e ight-hour workday. Before 1917, the steel mills were little autocracies where managers arbitrarily established wages and working conditions and suppressed all efforts at union organizing. During the war, workers flooded into the Amalgamated Association, the union that had been nearly destroyed by its defeat at Homestead a generation earlier. By the end 1 9 1 9 ★ 769 An advertisement placed by a steel company in a Pittsburgh newspaper announces, in several languages, that the steel strike of 1919 “has failed.” The use of the figure of Uncle Sam illustrates how the companies clothed their a nti-union stance in the language of patriotism. of 1918, they had won an eight-hour day. Employers’ anti-union activities resumed following the armistice that ended the fighting. “For why this war?” asked one Polish immigrant steelworker at a union meeting. “For why we buy Liberty bonds? For the mills? No, for freedom and America—for everybody. No more [work like a] horse and wagon. For eight-hour day.” In response to the strike, steel magnates launched a concerted counter attack. Employers appealed to anti-immigrant sentiment among native-born workers, many of whom returned to work, and conducted a propaganda campaign that associated the strikers with the IWW, communism, and disloyalty. “Americanism vs. Alienism” was the issue of the strike, declared the New York Tribune. With middle-class opinion having turned against the labor movement and the police in Pittsburgh assaulting workers on the streets, the strike collapsed in early 1920. The Red Scare Many Progressives hoped to see the wartime apparatus of economic planning continue after 1918. The Wilson administration, however, quickly dismantled the agencies that had established controls over industrial production and the labor market, although during the 1930s they would serve as models for some policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Wartime repression of dissent, however, continued. It reached its peak with the Red Scare of 1919–1920, a short-lived but intense period of political intolerance inspired by the postwar strike wave and the social tensions and fears generated by the Russian Revolution. Convinced that episodes like the steel strike were part of a worldwide communist conspiracy, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Novem ber 1919 and January 1920 dispatched federal agents to raid the offices of radical and labor organizations throughout the country. They carried search warrants so broad that they reminded those with a sense of history of the 770 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? writs of assistance against which James Otis had eloquently protested as being destructive of liberty in 1761. The Palmer Raids were overseen by the twenty-four-year-old director of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover. More than 5,000 persons were arrested, most of them without warrants, and held for months without charge. The government deported hundreds of immigrant radicals, including Emma Goldman. Hoover also began compiling files on thousands of Americans suspected of holding radical political ideas, a practice he would later continue as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The abuse of civil liberties in early 1920 was so severe that Palmer came under heavy criticism from Congress and much of the press. Secretary of Labor Louis Post began releasing imprisoned immigrants, and the Red Scare collapsed. Even the explosion of a bomb outside the New York Stock Exchange in September 1920, which killed forty persons, failed to rekindle it. (The perpetrators of this terrorist explosion, the worst on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, were never identified.) The reaction to the Palmer Raids planted the seeds for a new appreciation of the importance of civil liberties that would begin to flourish during the 1920s. But in their immediate impact, the events of 1919 and 1920 dealt a devastating setback to radical and labor organizations of all kinds and kindled an intense identification of patriotic Americanism with support for the political and economic status quo. The IWW had been effectively destroyed, and many moderate unions lay in disarray. The Socialist Party crumbled under the weight of governmental repression (the New York legislature expelled five Socialist members, and Congress denied Victor Berger the seat to which he had been elected from Wisconsin) and internal differences over the Russian Revolution. Wilson at Versailles The beating back of demands for fundamental social change was a severe rebuke to the hopes with which so many Progressives had enlisted in the war effort. Wilson’s inability to achieve a just peace based on the Fourteen Points compounded the sense of failure. Late in 1918, the president traveled to France to attend the Versailles peace conference. Greeted by ecstatic Paris crowds, he declared that American soldiers had come to Europe “as crusaders, not merely to win a war, but to win a cause . . . to lead the world on the way of liberty.” But he proved a less adept negotiator than his British and French counterparts, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. Although the Fourteen Points had called for “open covenants openly arrived at,” the negotiations were conducted in secret. The resulting Versailles Treaty did accomplish some of Wilson’s goals. It established the League of Nations, the body central to his vision of a new international order. It applied 1 9 1 9 ★ 771 the principle of self-determination to eastern Europe and redrew the map of that region. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire and parts of Germany and czarist Russia, new European nations emerged from the war— Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Yugoslavia. Some enjoyed ethno-linguistic unity, while others comprised unstable combinations of diverse nationalities. Despite Wilson’s pledge of a peace without territorial acquisitions or vengeance, the Versailles Treaty was a harsh document that all but guaranteed future conflict in Europe. Clemenceau won for France the right to occupy the Saar Basin and Rhineland—iron-and c oal-rich parts of Germany. The treaty placed strict limits on the size of Germany’s future army and navy. Lloyd George persuaded Wilson to agree to a clause declaring Germany morally responsible for the war and setting astronomical reparations payments (they were variously estimated at between $33 billion and $56 billion), which crippled the German economy. The Wilsonian Moment To many people around the world, the Great War destroyed European claims that theirs was a higher civilization, which gave them the right to rule over more barbaric peoples. In this sense, it helped to heighten the international prestige of the United States, a latecomer to the war. Like the ideals of the American Revolution, the Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination reverberated across the globe, especially among colonial peoples seeking independence. In fact, they took Wilson’s rhetoric more seriously than he did. Despite his belief in self-determination, he believed that colonial peoples required a long period of tutelage before they were ready for independence. Nonetheless, Wilsonian ideals quickly spread around the globe—not simply the idea that government must rest on the consent of the governed, but also Wilson’s stress on the “equality of nations,” large and small, and that international disputes should be settled by peaceful means rather than armed conflict. These stood in sharp contrast to the imperial ideas and practices of Europe. In Eastern Europe, whose people sought to carve new, independent nations from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, many considered Wilson a “popular saint.” The leading Arabic newspaper, Al-Ahram, published in Egypt, then under British rule, gave extensive coverage to Wilson’s speech asking Congress to declare war in the name of democracy, and to the Fourteen Points, and translated the Declaration of Independence into Arabic for its readers. In Beijing, students demanding that China free itself of foreign domination gathered at the American embassy shouting, “Long live Wilson.” Japan proposed to include in the charter of the new League of Nations a clause 772 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? EUROPE IN 1914 0 0 NORWAY DENMARK Ba NETHERLANDS RUSSIA BELGIUM GERMANY Prague Paris Atlantic Oc ea n lt Berlin London LUXEMBOURG Se a Moscow ic GREAT BRITAIN 500 miles 500 kilometers Petrograd SWEDEN North Sea 250 250 Vienna FRANCE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE SWITZERLAND ROMANIA Sarajevo PORTUGAL SPAIN SERBIA BULGARIA ITALY MONTENEGRO Rome ea Constantinople ALBANIA TURKEY (OTTOMAN EMPIRE) GREECE Allies Central Powers Neutral nations Black S Si c i l y Mediterranean Sea C re te C y p ru s World War I and the Versailles Treaty redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires ceased to exist, and Germany and Russia were reduced in size. A group of new states emerged in eastern Europe, embodying the principle of self-determination, one of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. recognizing the equality of all people, regardless of race. Hundreds of letters, petitions, and declarations addressed to President Wilson made their way to the Paris headquarters of the American delegation to the peace conference. Few reached the president, as his private secretary, Gilbert Close, carefully screened his mail. Outside of Europe, however, the idea of “self-determination” was stillborn. When the peace conference opened, Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned that the phrase was “loaded with dynamite” and would “raise hopes which can never be realized.” Wilson’s language, he feared, had put “dangerous” ideas “into the minds of certain races” and would inspire “impossible demands, and cause trouble in many lands.” As Lansing anticipated, advocates of colonial independence descended on Paris to lobby the peace negotiators. Arabs demanded that a unified independent state be carved from the old Ottoman empire in the 1 9 1 9 ★ 773 EUROPE IN 1919 FINLAND GREAT BRITAIN lt LITHUANIA EAST PRUSSIA Danzig (GERMANY) Ba NETHERLANDS 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers LATVIA Se DENMARK 0 ESTONIA ic North Sea SWEDEN a NORWAY 0 RUSSIA (Free City) LUXEMBOURG A tla n t i c O cea n BELGIUM POLAND CZECHOSLOVAKIA e in ra e Lor lsac FRANCE A GERMANY Rhineland Saar SWITZERLAND AUSTRIA HUNGARY ROMANIA Black S YUGOSLAVIA PORTUGAL SPAIN C or s i c a (Fr.) BULGARIA ITALY ALBANIA Sar di n i a (It.) ea TURKEY GREECE Si c i l y New nations Demilitarized or Allied occupied zone Mediterranean Sea C re te Dode c an e se Is. (Italy ) C y p ru s Middle East. Nguyen That Thanh, a young Vietnamese patriot working in Paris, pressed his people’s claim for greater rights within the French empire. Citing the Declaration of Independence, he appealed unsuccessfully to Wilson to help bring an end to French rule in Vietnam. W. E. B. Du Bois organized a P an-African Congress in Paris that put forward the idea of a self-governing nation to be carved out of Germany’s African colonies. Koreans, Indians, Irish, and others also pressed claims for s elf-determination. The British and French, however, had no intention of applying this principle to their own empires. They rebuffed the pleas of colonial peoples for self-rule. During the war, the British had encouraged Arab nationalism as a weapon against the Ottoman empire and had also pledged to create a homeland in Palestine for the persecuted Jews of Europe. In fact, the victors of World War I divided Ottoman territory into a series of new territories, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine, controlled by the victorious Allies under League of Nations “mandates.” South Africa, Australia, and Japan acquired former German colonies in Africa and Asia. Nor did Ireland achieve its independence at Versailles. Only at the end of 1921 did Britain finally agree to the creation 774 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? of the Irish Free State, while continuing to rule the northeastern corner of the island. As for the Japanese proposal to establish the principle of racial equality, Wilson, with the support of Great Britain and A ustralia, engineered its defeat. The Seeds of Wars to Come Du Bois, as noted above, hoped that black participation in the war effort would promote racial justice at home and self-government for colonies abroad. “We return,” he wrote in The Crisis in May 1919, “we return from fighting, we return fighting. Make way for Democracy!” But the war’s aftermath both in the United States and overseas left him bitterly disappointed. Du Bois concluded that Wilson had “never at any single moment meant to include in his democracy” black Americans or the colonial peoples of the world. “Most men today,” he complained, “cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery.” In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had made the memorable prediction that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” He now forecast a “fight for freedom” that would pit “black and brown and yellow men” throughout the world against racism and imperialism. Disappointment at the failure to apply the Fourteen Points to the non-European world created a pervasive cynicism about Western use of the language of freedom and democracy. Wilson’s apparent willingness to accede to the demands of the imperial powers helped to spark a series of popular protest movements across the Middle East and Asia, and the rise of a new anti-Western nationalism. It inspired the May 4 movement in China, a mass protest against the decision at the Versailles peace conference to award certain German concessions (parts of China governed by foreign powers) to Japan. Some leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi, pictured here in 1919, became the leader of the nonviolent movement for Nguyen That Thanh, who took the independence for India. He was among those name Ho Chi Minh, turned to commudisappointed by the failure of the Versailles nism, in whose name he would lead peace conference to apply the principle of Vietnam’s long and bloody struggle self-determination to the colonial world. for independence. With the collapse of 1 9 1 9 ★ 775 the Wilsonian moment, Lenin’s reputation in the colonial world began to eclipse that of the American president. But whether communist or not, these movements announced the emergence of anticolonial nationalism as a major force in world affairs, which it would remain for the rest of the twentieth century. “Your liberalness,” one Egyptian leader remarked, speaking of Britain and America, “is only for yourselves.” Yet ironically, when colonial peoples demanded to be recognized as independent members of the international community, they would invoke both the heritage of the American Revolution—the first colonial struggle that produced an independent nation—and the Wilsonian language whereby the s elf-governing nation-state is the most legitimate political institution, and all nations deserve equal respect. As Du Bois recognized, World War I sowed the seeds not of a lasting peace but of wars to come. German resentment over the peace terms would help to fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler and the coming of World War II. In the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, violence over the status of Northern Ireland, and seemingly unending conflicts in the Middle East, the world was still haunted by the ghost of Versailles. The Treaty Debate One final disappointment awaited Wilson on his return from Europe. He viewed the new League of Nations as the war’s finest legacy. But many Americans feared that membership in the League would commit the United States to an open-ended involvement in the affairs of other countries. Wilson asserted that the United States could not save the world without being continually involved with it. His opponents, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, argued that the League threatened to deprive the country of its freedom of action. A considerable majority of senators would have accepted the treaty with “reservations” ensuring that the obligation to assist League members against attack did not supersede the power of Congress to declare war. As governor of New Jersey and as president, Wilson had proved himself to be a skilled politician capable of compromising with opponents. In this case, however, convinced that the treaty reflected “the hand of God,” Wilson refused to negotiate with congressional leaders. In October 1919, in the midst of the League debate, Wilson suffered a serious stroke. Although the extent of his illness was kept secret, he remained incapacitated for the rest of his presidency. In effect, his wife, Edith, headed the government for the next seventeen months. In November 1919 and again in March 1920, the Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty. American involvement in World War I lasted barely nineteen months, but it cast a long shadow over the following decade—and, indeed, the rest of the century. In its immediate aftermath, the country retreated from international 776 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world? involvements. But in the long run, Wilson’s combination of idealism and power politics had an enduring impact. His appeals to democracy, open markets, and a special American mission to instruct the world in freedom, coupled with a willingness to intervene abroad militarily to promote American interests and values, would create the model for t wentieth-century American international relations. On its own terms, the war to make the world safe for democracy failed. Even great powers cannot always bend the world to their purposes. The war brought neither stability nor democracy to most of the world, and it undermined freedom in the United States. It also led to the eclipse of Progressivism. Republican candidate Warren G. Harding, who had no connection with the party’s Progressive wing, swept to victory in the presidential election of 1920. Harding’s campaign centered on a “return to normalcy” and a repudiation of what he called “Wilsonism.” He received 60 percent of the popular vote. Begun with idealistic goals and grand hopes for social change, American involvement in the Great War laid the foundation for one of the most conservative decades in the nation’s history. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Explain the role of the United States in the global economy by 1920. 2.What were the assumptions underlying the Roosevelt Corollary? How did the doctrine affect U.S. relations with European nations and those in the Western hemisphere? 3.What did President Wilson mean by “moral imperialism,” and what measures were taken to apply this to Latin America? 4.How did the ratification of both the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments suggest both the restrictive and democratizing nature of Progressivism? 5.Why did Progressives see in the expansion of governmental powers in wartime an opportunity to reform American society? 6.What were the goals and methods of the Committee on Public Information during World War I? 7.What are governmental and private examples of coercive patriotism during the war? What were the effects of those efforts? 8.What were the major causes—both real and i maginary—of the Red Scare? 9. How did World War I and its aftermath provide African-Americans with opportunities? 10.Identify the goals of those pressing for global change in 1919, and of those who opposed them. C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 777 KEY TERMS liberal internationalism (p. 736) Espionage Act (p. 752) Panama Canal Zone (p. 738) Sedition Act (p. 753) Roosevelt Corollary (p. 739) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (p. 764) Dollar Diplomacy (p. 739) moral imperialism (p. 740) Lusitania (p. 743) Zimmermann Telegram (p. 744) Fourteen Points (p. 745) Selective Service Act (p. 747) War Industries Board (p. 747) Eighteenth Amendment (p. 752) Go to Great Migration (p. 765) Tulsa riot (p. 767) Marcus Garvey (p. 767) Red Scare of 1919–1920 (p. 770) Versailles Treaty (p. 771) League of Nations (p. 771) Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. 778 ★ CHAPTER 19 Saf e f or Dem oc r ac y: Th e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d W W I What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 20 ★ FROM BUSINESS CULTURE TO GREAT DEPRESSION T H E T W E N T I E S , 1 9 2 0 –1 9 3 2 FOCUS QUESTIONS • Who benefited and who suffered in the new consumer society of the 1920s? • In what ways did the government promote business interests in the 1920s? • Why did the protection of civil liberties gain importance in the 1920s? • What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? • What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the government’s responses by 1932? I n May 1920, at the height of the postwar Red Scare, police arrested two Italian immigrants accused of participating in a robbery at a South Braintree, Massachusetts, factory in which a security guard was killed. Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an itinerant unskilled laborer, were anarchists who dreamed of a society in which government, churches, and private property had been abolished. They saw violence as an appropriate weapon of class warfare. But very little evidence linked them to this particular crime. One man claimed to have seen Vanzetti at the wheel of the getaway car, but all the other eyewitnesses described the driver quite differently. ★ 779 Disputed tests on one of the six bullets in the dead man’s body suggested that it might have been fired from a gun owned by Sacco. Neither fingerprints nor possession of stolen money linked either to the crime. In the atmosphere of anti-radical and anti-immigrant fervor, however, their conviction was a certainty. “I have suffered,” Vanzetti wrote from prison, “for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I A 1927 photograph shows Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti outside the courthouse in am a radical and indeed I am a radical; Dedham, Massachusetts, surrounded by security I have suffered because I was an Italian, agents and onlookers. They are about to enter and indeed I am an Italian.” the courthouse, where the judge will p ronounce Although their 1921 trial had their death sentences. aroused little public interest outside the Italian-American community, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti attracted international attention during the lengthy appeals that followed. There were mass protests in Europe against their impending execution. In the United States, the movement to save their lives attracted the support of an impressive array of intellectuals, including the novelist John Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School and a future justice of the Supreme Court. In response to the mounting clamor, the governor of Massachusetts appointed a three-member commission to review the case, headed by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University (and for many years an official of the Immigration Restriction League). The commission upheld the verdict and death sentences, and on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair. “It is not every prisoner,” remarked the journalist Heywood Broun, “who has a president of Harvard throw the switch for him.” The Sacco-Vanzetti case laid bare some of the fault lines beneath the surface of American society during the 1920s. The case, the writer Edmund Wilson commented, “revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its classes, professions and points of view and . . . it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social system.” It demonstrated how long the Red Scare extended into the 1920s and how powerfully it undermined basic American freedoms. It reflected the fierce cultural battles that raged in many communities during the decade. To many n ative-born Americans, the two men symbolized an alien threat to their way of life. To Italian-Americans, including respectable middle-class organizations like the Sons of Italy that raised money for the defense, the outcome symbolized the nativist prejudices and s tereotypes 780 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n that haunted immigrant communities. To Dos Passos, the executions underscored the success of the anti-radical crusade: “They are stronger. They are rich. They hire and fire the politicians, the old judges, . . . the college presidents.” Dos Passos’s lament was a bitter comment on the triumph of pro-business conservatism during the 1920s. In popular memory, the decade that followed World War I is recalled as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. With its flappers (young, sexually liberated women), speakeasies (nightclubs that sold liquor in violation of Prohibition), and a soaring stock market fueled by easy credit and a get-rich-quick outlook, it was a time of revolt against moral rules inherited from the nineteenth century. Observers from Europe, where class divisions were starkly visible in work, politics, and social relations, marveled at the uniformity of American life. Factories poured out standardized consumer goods, their sale promoted by national advertising campaigns. Conservatism dominated a political system from which radical alternatives seemed to have been purged. Radio and the movies spread mass culture throughout the nation. Americans seemed to dress alike, think alike, go to the same movies, and admire the same larger-than-life national celebrities. Many Americans, however, did not welcome the new secular, commercial culture. They resented and feared the ethnic and racial diversity of America’s cities and what they considered the lax moral standards of urban life. The 1920s was a decade of profound social tensions—between rural and urban Americans, traditional and “modern” Christianity, participants in the burgeoning consumer culture and those who did not fully share in the new prosperity. • CHRONOLOGY • 1915 Reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan 1919 Schenck v. United States 1920 American Civil Liberties Union established 1921 Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti 1922 Washington Naval Arms Conference Cable Act Herbert Hoover’s American Individualism 1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital Meyer v. Nebraska 1924 Immigration Act of 1924 Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 1925 Scopes trial 1927 Charles Lindbergh flies nonstop over the Atlantic Sacco and Vanzetti executed 1927– President Coolidge vetoes 1928McNary-Haugen farm bill 1929Sheppard-Towner Act repealed Stock market crashes 1930 Hollywood adopts the Hays code Smoot-Hawley Tariff 1932 Reconstruction Finance Corporation established Bonus march on Washington • FRO M BUSI N ESS CULTURE TO G R E AT D E P R E S S I O N ★ 781 • THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA A Decade of Prosperity “The chief business of the American people,” said Calvin Coolidge, who became president after Warren G. Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1923, “is business.” Rarely in American history had economic growth seemed more dramatic, cooperation between business and government so close, and business values so widely shared. After a sharp postwar recession that lasted into 1922, the 1920s was a decade of prosperity. Productivity and economic output rose dramatically as new industries—chemicals, aviation, electronics—flourished and older ones like food processing and the manufacture of household appliances adopted Henry Ford’s moving assembly line. The automobile was the backbone of economic growth. The most celebrated American factories now turned out cars, not textiles and steel as in the nineteenth century. Annual automobile production tripled during the 1920s, from 1.5 to 4.8 million. General Motors, which learned the secret of marketing numerous individual models and stylish designs, surpassed Ford with its cheap, standardized Model T (replaced in 1927 by the Model A). By 1929, half of all American families owned a car (a figure not reached in England until 1980). The automobile industry stimulated the expansion of steel, rubber, and oil production, road construction, and other sectors of the economy. It promoted tourism and the growth of suburbs (already, some commuters were driving to work) and helped to reduce rural isolation. During the 1920s, American multinational corporations extended their sway throughout the world. With Europe still recovering from the Great War, American investment overseas far exceeded that of other countries. The dollar replaced the British pound as the most important currency of international trade. American companies produced 85 percent of the world’s cars and 40 percent of its manufactured goods. General Electric and International Telephone and Telegraph bought up companies in other countries. International Business Machines (IBM) was the world’s leader in office supplies. American oil companies built new refineries overseas. American companies took control of raw materials abroad, from rubber in Liberia to oil in Venezuela. One unsuccessful example of the global spread of American corporations was Fordlandia, an effort by the auto manufacturer Henry Ford to create a town in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. Ford hoped to secure a steady supply of rubber for car tires. But as in the United States, where he had compelled immigrant workers to adopt American dress and diet, he wanted to bring local 782 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n Who benefited and who suffered in the new consumer society of the 1920s? inhabitants up to what he considered the proper standard of life (this meant, for example, forbidding his workers from using alcohol and tobacco and trying to get them to stop eating traditional Brazilian foods). Eventually, the climate and local insects destroyed the rubber trees that Ford’s engineers, lacking experience in tropical agriculture, had planted much too close together, while the workers rebelled against the long hours of labor and regimentation of the community. A New Society During the 1920s, consumer goods of all kinds proliferated, marketed by salesmen and advertisers who promoted them as ways of satisfying Americans’ psychological desires and everyday needs. Frequently purchased on credit through new installment buying plans, they rapidly altered daily life. Telephones made communication easier. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and refrigerators transformed work in the home and reduced the demand for domestic servants. Boosted by Prohibition and an aggressive advertising campaign that, according to the company’s sales director, made it “impossible for the consumer to escape” the product, C oca-Cola became a symbol of American life. Americans spent more and more of their income on leisure activities like vacations, movies, and sporting events. By 1929, weekly movie attendance had reached 80 million, double the figure of 1922. Hollywood films now dominated the world movie market. Movies had been produced early in the century in several American cities, but shortly before World War I filmmakers gravitated to Hollywood, a district of Los Angeles, attracted by the open space, year-round sunshine for outdoor filming, and varied scenery. In 1910, two French companies, Pathé and Gaumont, had been the world’s leading film producers. By 1925, American releases outnumbered French by eight to one. In the 1920s, both companies abandoned film production for the more profitable business of distributing American films in Europe. Radios and phonographs brought mass entertainment into Americans’ living rooms. The number of radios in Americans’ homes rose from 190,000 in 1923 to just under 5 million in 1929. These developments helped to create and spread a new celebrity culture, in which recording, film, and sports stars moved to the top of the list of American heroes. During the 1920s, more than 100 million records were sold each year. RCA Victor sold so many recordings of the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso that he is sometimes called the first modern celebrity. He was soon joined by the film actor Charlie Chaplin, baseball player Babe Ruth, and boxer Jack Dempsey. Ordinary Americans followed every detail of their lives. Perhaps the decade’s greatest celebrity, in terms of intensive press coverage, was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic. The Business of A merica ★ 783 André Siegfried, a Frenchman who visited the United States four times, commented in 1928 that a “new society” had come into being, in which Americans considered their “standard of living” a “sacred acquisition, which they will defend at any price.” In this new “mass civilization,” widespread acceptance of going into debt to purchase consumer goods had replaced the values of thrift and self-denial, central to n ineteenth-century notions of upstanding character. Work, once seen as a source of pride in craft skill, now came to be valued as a path to individual fulfillment through consumption and entertainment. The Limits of Prosperity “Big business in America,” remarked the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “is producing what the socialists held up as their g oal—food, shelter, and clothing for all.” But signs of future trouble could be seen beneath the prosperity of the 1920s. The fruits of increased production were very unequally distributed. Real wages for industrial workers (wages adjusted to take account of inflation) rose by o ne- quarter between 1922 and 1929, but corporate profits rose at more than twice that rate. The process of economic concentration continued unabated. A handful of firms dominated numerous sectors of the economy. In 1929, 1 percent of the nation’s banks controlled half of its financial resources. Most of the small auto companies that had existed earlier in the century had fallen by the wayside. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler now controlled four-fifths of the industry. At the beginning of 1929, the share of national income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families exceeded that of the bottom 60 percent. A majority of families had no savings, and an estimated 40 percent of the population remained in poverty, unable to participate in the flourishing consumer economy. Improved productivity meant that goods could be produced with fewer workers. During the 1920s, more Americans worked in the professions, retailing, finance, and education, but the number of manufacturing workers declined by 5 percent, the first such drop in the nation’s history. Parts of New England were already experiencing the chronic unemployment caused by deindustrialization. Many of the region’s textile companies failed in the face of l ow-wage competition from southern factories, or shifted production to take advantage of the South’s cheap labor. Most advertisers directed their messages at businessmen and the middle class. At the end of the decade, 75 percent of American households still did not own a washing machine, and 60 percent had no radio. The Farmers’ Plight Nor did farmers share in the decade’s prosperity. The “golden age” of American farming had reached its peak during World War I, when the need to feed war-torn Europe and government efforts to maintain high farm prices had 784 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n Who benefited and who suffered in the new consumer society of the 1920s? raised farmers’ incomes and promoted the purchase of more land on credit. Thanks to mechanization and the increased use of fertilizer and insecticides, agricultural production continued to rise even when government subsidies ended and world demand stagnated. As a result, farm incomes declined steadily and banks foreclosed tens of thousands of farms whose owners were unable to Kansas agricultural workers breaking new ground with disk plows, which eased the task of readymeet mortgage payments. For the first time in the nation’s his- ing the sod of the Great Plains for planting and encouraged the emergence of larger farms. tory, the number of farms and farmers Simon Fishman, a Jewish farmer known as the declined during the 1920s. For example, “wheat king,” in jacket and tie, is on the first half the farmers in Montana lost their tractor. land to foreclosure between 1921 and 1925. Extractive industries, like mining and lumber, also suffered as their products faced a glut on the world market. During the decade, some 3 million persons migrated out of rural areas. Many headed for southern California, whose rapidly growing economy needed new labor. The population of Los Angeles, the West’s leading industrial center, a producer of oil, automobiles, aircraft, and, of course, Hollywood movies, rose from 575,000 to 2.2 million during the decade, largely because of an influx of displaced farmers from the Midwest. Well before the 1930s, rural America was in an economic depression. The 1920s, however, was not simply a period of decline on the farm but of significant technological change. The mechanization of agriculture had been taking place since the m id-nineteenth century, especially in the West, but it now accelerated dramatically. New inventions came into widespread use on the Great Plains, especially the steam tractor and the disk plow, which killed weeds, chopped up the sod, and left the surface layer much easier to plant. Mechanization encouraged an increase in the scale of agriculture. From farms growing wheat to California orange groves, the western states became home to modern “factory farms,” employing large numbers of migrant laborers. Massive irrigation projects completed in the previous decades made the Far West much more suitable for farming. Farm output boomed in previously arid parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. With immigration from Asia barred and blacks unwanted, agribusinesses recruited workers from across the southern border, and immigrants from Mexico came to make up the vast majority of the West’s l ow-wage farm migrants. On the Great Plains, extensive plowing while ignoring environmental risks set the stage for the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Business of A merica ★ 785 The Image of Business Hollywood films spread images of “the American way of life” across the globe. America, wrote the historian Charles Beard, was “boring its way” into the world’s consciousness. In high wages, efficient factories, and the mass production of consumer goods, Americans seemed to have discovered the secret of permanent prosperity. Businessmen like Henry Ford and engineers like Herbert Hoover were cultural heroes. Photographers such as Lewis Hine and Margaret Bourke-White and painters like Charles Sheeler celebrated the beauty of machines and factories. The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 best-seller by advertising executive Bruce Barton, portrayed Jesus Christ as “the greatest advertiser of his day, . . . a virile go-getting he-man of business,” who “picked twelve men from the bottom ranks and forged a great organization.” After the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, discussed in Chapter 18, John D. Rockefeller himself hired a public relations firm to repair his tarnished image. Now, persuaded by the success of World War I’s Committee on Public Information, numerous firms established public relations departments to justify corporate practices to the public and counteract its long-standing distrust of big business. They succeeded in changing popular attitudes toward Wall Street. Congressional hearings of 1912–1914 headed by Louisiana congressman Arsène Pujo had laid bare the manipulation of stock prices by a Wall Street “money trust.” The Pujo investigation had reinforced the widespread view of the stock market as a place where insiders fleeced small investors—as, indeed, they frequently did. But in the 1920s, as the steadily rising price of stocks made front-page news, the market attracted more investors. Many assumed that stock values would rise forever. By 1928, an estimated 1.5 million Americans owned stock—still a small minority of the country’s 28 million families, but far more than in the past. The Decline of Labor With the defeat of the labor upsurge of 1919 and the dismantling of the wartime regulatory state, business appropriated the rhetoric of Americanism and “industrial freedom” as weapons against labor unions. Some corporations during the 1920s implemented a new style of management. They provided their employees with private pensions and medical insurance plans, job security, and greater workplace safety. They established sports programs to occupy their employees’ leisure time. They spoke of “welfare capitalism,” a more socially conscious kind of business leadership, and trumpeted the fact that they now paid more attention to the “human factor” in employment. At the same time, however, employers in the 1920s embraced the American Plan, at whose core stood the open s hop—a workplace free of both government 786 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n Who benefited and who suffered in the new consumer society of the 1920s? regulation and unions, except, in some cases, “company unions” created and controlled by management. Collective bargaining, declared one group of employers, represented “an infringement of personal liberty and a menace to the institutions of a free people.” Prosperity, they insisted, depended on giving business complete freedom of action. This message was reinforced in a propaganda campaign that linked unionism and socialism as examples of the sinister influence of foreigners on American life. Even the most forward-looking companies continued to employ strikebreakers, private detectives, and the blacklisting of union organizers to prevent or defeat strikes. During the 1920s, organized labor lost more than 2 million members, and unions agreed to demand after demand by employers in an effort to stave off complete elimination. In cities like Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Seattle, once centers of thriving labor movements, unions all but disappeared. Uprisings by the most downtrodden workers did occur sporadically throughout the decade. Southern textile mills witnessed desperate strikes by workers who charged employers with “making slaves out of the men and women” who labored there. Facing the combined opposition of business, local politicians, and the courts, as well as the threat of violence, such strikes were doomed to defeat. The Equal Rights Amendment The idealistic goals of World War I, wrote the young Protestant minister Reinhold Niebuhr, seemingly had been abandoned: “We are rapidly becoming the most conservative nation on earth.” Like the labor movement, feminists struggled to adapt to the new political situation. The achievement of suffrage in 1920 eliminated the bond of unity between various activists, each “struggling for her own conception of freedom,” in the words of labor reformer Juliet Stuart Poyntz. Black feminists insisted that the movement must now demand enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South, but they won little support from white counterparts. A few prominent feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch, joined the rapidly diminishing Socialist Party, convinced that women should support an independent electoral force that promoted governmental protection of vulnerable workers. The long-standing division between two competing conceptions of woman’s freedom—one based on motherhood, the other on individual autonomy and the right to work—now crystallized in the debate over an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution promoted by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. This amendment proposed to eliminate all legal distinctions “on account of sex.” In Paul’s opinion, the ERA followed logically from winning the right to vote. Having gained political equality, she insisted, women no longer required special legal protection—they needed equal access The Business of A merica ★ 787 to employment, education, and all the other opportunities of citizens. To supporters of mothers’ pensions and laws limiting women’s hours of labor, which the ERA would sweep away, the proposal represented a giant step backward. Apart from the National Woman’s Party, every major female organization, from the League of Women Voters to the Women’s Trade Union League, opposed the ERA. In the end, none of these groups achieved success in the 1920s. The ERA campaign failed, as did a proposed constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to prohibit child labor, which farm groups and business organizations opposed. In 1929, Congress repealed the S heppard-Towner Act of 1921, a major achievement of the maternalist reformers that had provided federal assistance to programs for infant and child health. Women’s Freedom If political feminism faded, the prewar feminist demand for personal freedom survived in the vast consumer marketplace and in the actual behavior of the decade’s much-publicized liberated young women. Female liberation resurfaced as a lifestyle, the stuff of advertising and mass entertainment, stripped of any connection to political or economic radicalism. No longer one element in a broader program of social reform, sexual freedom now meant individual autonomy or personal rebellion. With her bobbed hair, short skirts, public smoking and drinking, and unapologetic use of b irth-control methods such as the diaphragm, the young, single flapper epitomized the change in standards of sexual behavior, at least in large cities. She frequented dance halls and music clubs where white people now performed “wild” dances like the Charleston that had long been popular in black communities. She attended sexually charged Hollywood films featuring stars like Clara Bow, the provocative “‘It’ Girl,” and Rudolph Valentino, the original on-screen “Latin Lover.” When Valentino died of a sudden illness in 1926, crowds of grieving women tried to storm the funeral home. What had been scandalous a generation earlier—women’s self-conscious pursuit of personal p leasure—became a device to market goods from automobiles to cigarettes. In 1904, a woman had been arrested for smoking in public in New York City. Two decades later, Edward Bernays, the “father” of modern public relations, masterminded a campaign to persuade women to smoke, dubbing cigarettes women’s “torches of freedom.” The new freedom, however, was available only during one phase of a woman’s life. Once she married, what Jane Addams had called the “family claim” still ruled. And marriage, according to one advertisement, remained “the one pursuit that stands foremost in the mind of every girl and woman.” Having found a husband, women were expected to 788 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n In what ways did the government promote business interests in the 1920s? (Left) Advertisers marketed cigarettes to women as symbols of female independence. The August 27, 1925 cover of Life magazine shows a young man and a young woman dressed identically at the beach in revealing bathing suits (by 1920s standards), both enjoying cigarettes. (Right) An ad for a washing machine promises to liberate women from the “slavery” of everyday laundering at home. seek freedom within the confines of the home, finding “liberation,” according to the advertisements, in the use of new labor-saving appliances. BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT The Retreat from Progressivism In 1924, a social scientist remarked that the United States had just passed through “one of the most critical t en-year periods” in its history. Among the changes was the disintegration of Progressivism as a political movement and body of thought. The government’s success in whipping up mass hysteria during the war seemed to undermine the very foundation of democratic thought—the idea of the rational, self-directed citizen. Followers of Sigmund Freud emphasized the unconscious, instinctual motivations of human behavior; scientists pointed to wartime IQ tests allegedly demonstrating that many Americans were mentally unfit for self-government. “The great bulk of people are stupid,” declared one advertising executive, explaining why advertisements played on the emotions rather than providing actual information. Business and G overnment ★ 789 During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann published two of the most penetrating indictments of democracy ever written, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, which repudiated the Progressive hope of applying “intelligence” to social problems in a mass democracy. Instead of acting out of careful consideration of the issues or even individual self-interest, Lippmann claimed, the American voter was ill-informed and prone to fits of enthusiasm. Not only were modern problems beyond the understanding of ordinary men and women (a sentiment that had earlier led Lippmann to favor administration by experts), but the independent citizen was nothing but a myth. Like advertising copywriters and journalists, he continued, the government had perfected the art of creating and manipulating public opinion—a process Lippmann called the “manufacture of consent.” In 1929, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published Middletown, a classic study of life in Muncie, Indiana, a typical community in the American heartland. The Lynds found that new leisure activities and a new emphasis on consumption had replaced politics as the focus of public concern. Elections were no longer “lively centers” of public attention as in the nineteenth century, and voter participation had fallen dramatically. National statistics bore out their point; the turnout of eligible voters, over 80 percent in 1896, dropped to less than 50 percent in 1924. Many factors helped to explain this decline, including the consolidation of o ne- party politics in the South, the long period of Republican dominance in national elections, and the enfranchisement of women, who for many years voted in lower numbers than men. But the shift from public to private concerns also played a part. “The American citizen’s first importance to his country,” declared a Muncie newspaper, “is no longer that of a citizen but that of a consumer.” The Republican Era Government policies reflected the p ro-business ethos of the 1920s. Recalling the era’s prosperity, one stockbroker later remarked, “God, J. P. Morgan and the Republican Party were going to keep everything going forever.” Business lobbyists dominated national conventions of the Republican Party. They called on the federal government to lower taxes on personal incomes and business profits, maintain high tariffs, and support employers’ continuing campaign against unions. The administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge obliged. “Never before, here or anywhere else,” declared the Wall Street Journal, “has a government been so completely fused with business.” The two presidents appointed so many p ro-business members of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and other Progressive-era agencies that, complained Nebraska senator George W. Norris, they in effect repealed the regulatory system. The Harding administration did support Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s successful effort to persuade the steel industry to reduce the 790 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n In what ways did the government promote business interests in the 1920s? workday from twelve to eight hours. But it resumed the practice of obtaining court injunctions to suppress strikes, as in a 1922 walkout of 250,000 railroad workers protesting a wage cut. Under William Howard Taft, appointed chief justice in 1921, the Supreme Court remained strongly conservative. A resurgence of laissez-faire jurisprudence eclipsed the Progressive ideal of a socially active national state. The Court struck down a federal law that barred goods produced by child labor from interstate commerce. It even repudiated Muller v. Oregon (see Chapter 18) in a 1923 decision (Adkins v. Children’s Hospital) overturning a minimum wage law for women in Washington, D.C. Now that women enjoyed the vote, the justices declared, they were entitled to the same workplace freedom as men. “This,” lamented Florence Kelley, “is a new Dred Scott decision,” which, in the name of liberty of contract, “fills those words with the bitterest and most cruel mockery.” Corruption in Government Warren G. Harding took office as president in 1921 promising a “return to normalcy” after an era of Progressive reform and world war. Reflecting the prevailing g et-rich-quick ethos, his administration quickly became one of the most corrupt in American history. A likeable, somewhat ineffectual individual—he called himself “a man of limited talents from a small town”—Harding seemed to have little regard for either governmental issues or the dignity of the presidency. Prohibition did not cause him to curb his appetite for liquor. He continued a previous illicit affair with a young Ohio woman, Nan Britton. The relationship did not become known until 1927, when Britton published The President’s Daughter, about their child to whom Harding had left nothing in his will. Although his cabinet included men of integrity and talent, like Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Harding also surrounded himself with cronies who used their offices for private gain. Attorney General Harry Daugherty accepted payments not to prosecute accused criminals. The head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles Forbes, received kickbacks from the sale of government supplies. The most notorious scandal involved Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who accepted nearly $500,000 from private businessmen to whom he leased government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Fall became the first cabinet member in history to be convicted of a felony. The Election of 1924 Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, who as governor of Massachusetts had won national fame for using state troops against striking Boston policemen in 1919, was a dour man of few words. But in contrast to his predecessor he Business and G overnment ★ 791 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Lucian W. Parrish, Speech in Congress on Immigration (1921) In the immediate aftermath of World War I, fears of foreign radicalism sparked by labor upheavals, and the increased concern with Americanizing immigrants, greatly strengthened demands to curtail immigration. During a debate in the House of Representatives in April 1921, Lucian W. Parrish, a Democrat from Texas, laid out the case for immigration restriction. We should stop immigration entirely until such a time as we can amend our immigration laws and so write them that hereafter no one shall be admitted except he be in full sympathy with our Constitution and laws, willing to declare himself obedient to our flag, and willing to release himself from any obligations he may owe to the flag of the country from which he came. It is time that we act now, because within a few short years the damage will have been done. The endless tide of immigration will have filled our country with a foreign and unsympathetic element. Those who are out of sympathy with our Constitution and the spirit of our Government will be here in large numbers, and the true spirit of Americanism left us by our fathers will gradually become poisoned by this uncertain element. The time once was when we welcomed to our shores the oppressed and downtrodden people from all the world, but they came to us because of oppression at home and with the sincere purpose of making true and loyal American citizens, and in truth and in fact they did adapt themselves to our ways of thinking and contributed in a substantial sense to the progress and development that our civilization has made. But that time has passed now; new and strange conditions have arisen in the countries over there; new and strange doctrines are being taught. The governments of the Orient are being overturned and destroyed, and anarchy and bolshevism are threatening the very foundation of many of them and no one can foretell what the future will bring to many of those countries of the Old World now struggling with these problems. Our country is a self-sustaining country. It has taught the principles of real democracy to all the nations of the earth; its flag has been the synonym of progress, prosperity, and the preservation of the rights of the individual, and there can be nothing so dangerous as for us to allow the undesirable foreign element to poison our civilization and thereby threaten the safety of the institutions that our forefathers have established for us. . . . We must hold this country true to the American thought and the American ideals. 792 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n From Majority Opinion, Justice James C. McReynolds, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) A landmark in the development of civil liberties, the Supreme Court’s decision in Meyer v. Nebraska rebuked the coercive Americanization impulse of World War I, overturning a Nebraska law that required all school instruction to take place in English. The problem for our determination is whether the statute [prohibiting instruction in a language other than English] as construed and applied unreasonably infringes the liberty guaranteed . . . by the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . The American people have always regarded education and acquisition of knowledge as matters of supreme importance which should be diligently promoted. . . . The calling always has been regarded as useful and honorable, essential, indeed, to the public welfare. Mere knowledge of the German language cannot reasonably be regarded as harmful. Heretofore it has been commonly looked upon as helpful and desirable. [Meyer] taught this language in school as part of his occupation. His right to teach and the right of parents to engage him so to instruct their children, we think, are within the liberty of the Amendment. It is said the purpose of the legislation was to promote civil development by inhibiting training and education of the immature in foreign tongues and ideals before they could learn English and acquire American ideals. . . . It is also affirmed that the foreign born population is very large, that certain communities commonly use foreign words, follow foreign leaders, move in a foreign atmosphere, and that the children are therefore hindered from becoming citizens of the most useful type and the public safety is impaired. That the State may do much, go very far, indeed, in order to improve the quality of its citizens, physically, mentally, and morally, is clear; but the individual has certain fundamental rights which must be respected. The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue. Perhaps it would be highly advantageous if QU E STIONS all had ready understanding of our ordinary speech, but this cannot be 1. Why does Parrish consider continued immigracoerced by methods which conflict tion dangerous? with the Constitution. . . . No emer2. How does the decision in Meyer v. Nebraska gency has arisen which rendered expand the definition of liberty protected by the knowledge by a child of some lanFourteenth Amendment? guage other than English so clearly 3. How do the two excerpts reflect deep divisions harmful as to justify its inhibition over the nature of American society during the with the consequent infringement of 1920s? rights long freely enjoyed. V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 793 seemed to exemplify Yankee honesty. The scandals subsided, but otherwise Coolidge continued his predecessor’s policies. He twice vetoed the McNary- Haugen bill, the top legislative priority of congressmen from farm states. This bill sought to have the government purchase agricultural products for sale overseas in order to raise farm prices. Coolidge denounced it as an unwarranted interference with the free market. In 1924, Coolidge was reelected in a landslide, defeating John W. Davis, a Progressive Optimism, a satirical comment on Wall Street lawyer nominated on the Robert La Follette’s campaign for president in 103rd ballot by a badly divided Demo1924 as the candidate of the Progressive Party, cratic convention. (This was when the has a disheveled westerner (labeled Wisconsin, comedian Will Rogers made the quip, La Follette’s state) tied to a stake in the desert while a goat dressed as a cowboy and labeled often repeated in future years, “I am a “Third Party” heads off to bring the party’s mesmember of no organized political party; sage to the “uneducated East.” I am a Democrat.”) One-sixth of the electorate in 1924 voted for Robert La Follette, running as the candidate of a new Progressive Party, which called for greater taxation of wealth, the conservation of natural resources, public ownership of the railroads, farm relief, and the end of child labor. Although such ideas had been proposed many times before World War I, Coolidge described the platform as a blueprint for a “communistic and socialistic” America. Despite endorsements from veteran Progressives like Jane Addams and John Dewey and the American Federation of Labor, La Follette could raise no more than $250,000 for his campaign. He carried only his native Wisconsin. But his candidacy demonstrated the survival of some currents of dissent in a highly conservative decade. Economic Diplomacy Foreign affairs also reflected the close working relationship between business and government. “Any student of modern diplomacy,” declared Huntington Wilson, a State Department official, “knows that in these days of competition, capital, trade, agriculture, labor and statecraft all go hand in hand if a country is to profit.” The 1920s marked a retreat from Wilson’s goal of internationalism in favor of unilateral American actions mainly designed to increase exports and investment opportunities overseas. Indeed, what is sometimes called the “isolationism” of 794 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n Why did the protection of civil liberties gain importance in the 1920s? the 1920s represented a reaction against the disappointing results of Wilson’s military and diplomatic pursuit of freedom and democracy abroad. The United States did play host to the Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1922 that negotiated reductions in the navies of Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. But the country remained outside the League of Nations. Even as American diplomats continued to press for access to markets overseas, the F ordney- McCumber Tariff of 1922 raised taxes on imported goods to their highest levels in history, a repudiation of Wilson’s principle of promoting free trade. Much foreign policy was conducted through private economic relationships rather than governmental action. The United States emerged from World War I as both the world’s foremost center of manufacturing and the major financial power, thanks to British and French debts for American loans that had funded their war efforts. During the 1920s, New York bankers, sometimes acting on their own and sometimes with the cooperation of the Harding and Coolidge administrations, solidified their international position by extending loans to European and Latin American governments. They advanced billions of dollars to Germany to enable the country to meet its World War I reparations payments. American industrial firms, especially in auto, agricultural machinery, and electrical equipment manufacturing, established plants overseas to supply the world market and take advantage of inexpensive labor. American investors gained control over raw materials such as copper in Chile and oil in Venezuela. In 1928, in the s o-called Red Line Agreement, British, French, and American oil companies divided oil-producing regions in the Middle East and Latin America among themselves. As before World War I, the government dispatched soldiers when a change in government in the Caribbean threatened American economic interests. Having been stationed in Nicaragua since 1912, American marines withdrew in 1925. But the troops soon returned in an effort to suppress a nationalist revolt headed by General Augusto César Sandino. Having created a National Guard headed by General Anastasio Somoza, the marines finally departed in 1933. A year later, Somoza assassinated Sandino and seized power. For the next forty-five years, he and his family ruled and plundered Nicaragua. Somoza’s son was overthrown in 1979 by a popular movement calling itself the Sandinistas (see Chapter 26). THE BIRTH OF CIVIL LIBERTIES Among the casualties of World War I and the 1920s was Progressivism’s faith that an active federal government embodied the national purpose and enhanced the enjoyment of freedom. Wartime and postwar repression, The Birth of C ivil L iberties ★ 795 Prohibition, and the p ro-business policies of the 1920s all illustrated, in the eyes of many Progressives, how public power could go grievously wrong. This lesson opened the door to a new appreciation of civil liberties—rights an individual may assert even against democratic m ajorities—as essential elements of American freedom. Building on prewar struggles for freedom of expression by labor unions, socialists, and b irth-control advocates, some reformers now developed a greater appreciation of the necessity of vibrant, unrestricted political debate. In the name of a “new freedom for the individual,” the 1920s saw the birth of a coherent concept of civil liberties and the beginnings of significant legal protection for freedom of speech against the government. The “Free Mob” Wartime repression continued into the 1920s. Under the heading “Sweet Land of Liberty,” The Nation magazine in 1923 detailed recent examples of the degradation of American freedom—lynchings in Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida; the beating by Columbia University students of an undergraduate who had written a letter defending freedom of speech and the press; the arrest of a union leader in New Jersey and 400 members of the IWW in California; a refusal to allow a socialist to speak in Pennsylvania. Throughout the 1920s, artistic works with sexual themes were subjected to rigorous censorship. The Postal Service removed from the mails books it deemed obscene. The Customs Service barred works by the sixteenth-century French satirist Rabelais, the modern novelist James Joyce, and many others from entering the country. A local crusade against indecency made the phrase “Banned in Boston” a term of ridicule among upholders of artistic freedom. Boston’s Watch and Ward Committee excluded sixty-five books from the city’s bookstores, including works by the novelists Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. Hollywood producers feared that publicity over actress Mary Pickford’s divorce, actor Wallace Reid’s death from a drug overdose, and a murder trial involving actor Fatty Arbuckle would reinforce the belief that movies promoted immorality. In 1930, the film industry adopted the Hays code, a sporadically enforced set of guidelines that prohibited movies from depicting nudity, long kisses, and adultery, and barred scripts that portrayed clergymen in a negative light or criminals sympathetically. Filmmakers hoped that s elf-censorship would prevent censorship by local governments, a not uncommon occurrence since the courts deemed movies a business subject to regulation, not a form of expression. Not until 1951, in a case involving The Miracle, a film many Catholics found offensive, would the Supreme Court declare movies an artistic form protected by the First Amendment. 796 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n Why did the protection of civil liberties gain importance in the 1920s? Even as Europeans turned in increasing numbers to American popular c ulture and consumer goods, some came to view the country as a repressive cultural wasteland. Americans, commented the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who lived for a time in the United States, prided themselves on being the “land of the free,” but “the free mob” had destroyed the right to dissent. “I have never been in any country,” he wrote, “where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen.” Disillusionment with the conservatism of American politics and the materialism of the culture inspired some American artists and writers to emigrate to Paris. The Lost Generation of cultural exiles included novelists and poets like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Europe, they felt, valued art and culture, and appreciated unrestrained freedom of expression (and, of course, allowed individuals to drink legally). A “Clear and Present Danger” During World War I, the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes later recalled, “there suddenly came to the fore in our nation’s life the new issue of civil liberties.” The arrest of antiwar dissenters under the Espionage and Sedition Acts inspired the formation in 1917 of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which in 1920 became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For the rest of the century, the ACLU would take part in most of the landmark cases that helped to bring about a “rights revolution.” Its efforts helped to give meaning to traditional civil liberties like freedom of speech and invented new ones, like the right to privacy. When it began, however, the ACLU was a small, beleaguered organization. A coalition of pacifists, Progressives shocked by wartime repression, and lawyers outraged at what they considered violations of Americans’ legal rights, it saw its own pamphlets defending free speech barred from the mails by postal inspectors. Prior to World War I, the Supreme Court had done almost nothing to protect the rights of unpopular minorities. Now, it was forced to address the question of the permissible limits on political and economic dissent. In its initial decisions, it dealt the concept of civil liberties a series of devastating blows. In 1919, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act and the conviction of Charles T. Schenck, a socialist who had distributed antidraft leaflets through the mails. Speaking for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that the First Amendment did not prevent Congress from prohibiting speech that presented a “clear and present danger” of inspiring illegal actions. Free speech, he observed, “would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” The Birth of C ivil L iberties ★ 797 For the next h alf-century, Holmes’s doctrine would remain the basic test in First Amendment cases. Since the Court usually allowed public officials to decide what speech was in fact “dangerous,” it hardly provided a stable basis for the defense of free expression in times of crisis. A week after Schenck v. United States, the Court unanimously upheld the conviction of Eugene V. Debs for a speech condemning the war. It also affirmed the wartime jailing of the editor of a German-language newspaper whose editorials had questioned the draft’s constitutionality. The Court and Civil Liberties Also in 1919, the Court upheld the conviction of Jacob Abrams and five other men for distributing pamphlets critical of American intervention in Russia after the Russian revolution. This time, however, Holmes and Louis Brandeis dissented, marking the emergence of a court minority committed to a broader defense of free speech. Six years after Abrams, the two again dissented when the majority upheld the conviction of Benjamin Gitlow, a communist whose Left-wing Manifesto calling for revolution led to his conviction under a New York law prohibiting “criminal anarchy.” “The only meaning of free speech,” Holmes now declared, was that advocates of every set of beliefs, even “proletarian dictatorship,” should have the right to convert the public to their views in the great “marketplace of ideas” (an apt metaphor for a consumer society). In approving Gitlow’s conviction, the Court majority observed that the Fourteenth Amendment obligated the states to refrain from unreasonable restraints on freedom of speech and the press. The comment marked a major step in the long process by which the Bill of Rights was transformed from an ineffective statement of principle into a significant protection of Americans’ freedoms. The tide of c ivil-liberties decision making slowly began to turn. By the end of the 1920s, the Supreme Court had voided a Kansas law that made it a crime to advocate unlawful acts to change the political or economic system, and one from Minnesota authorizing censorship of the press. The new regard for free speech went beyond political expression. In 1930, the Court threw out the conviction of Mary Ware Dennett for sending a s ex-education pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life, through the mails. Three years later, a federal court overturned the Customs Service’s ban on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, a turning point in the battle against the censorship of works of literature. Meanwhile, Brandeis was crafting an intellectual defense of civil liberties on grounds somewhat different from Holmes’s model of a competitive market in ideas. In 1927, the Court upheld the conviction of the prominent California socialist and women’s rights activist Anita Whitney for attending a convention of the Communist Labor Party where speakers advocated violent 798 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? revolution. Brandeis voted with the majority on technical grounds. But he issued a powerful defense of freedom of speech as essential to active citizenship in a democracy: “Those who won our independence believed . . . that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth. . . . The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” A month after the decision, the governor of California pardoned Whitney, terming freedom of speech the “indispensable birthright of every free American.” The intrepid Mrs. Whitney was soon back in court for violating a California law making it a crime to display a red flag. In 1931, the Supreme Court overturned the law as “repugnant to the guaranty of liberty contained in the Fourteenth Amendment.” A judicial defense of civil liberties was slowly being born. The defendants in U.S. v. Abrams, on the day of their deportation to Russia in 1921. Jacob Abrams is on the right. They were convicted under the Espionage Act of 1918 for impeding the war effort by distributing pamphlets critical of the American intervention in Russia after the Russian revolution. THE CULTURE WARS The Fundamentalist Revolt Although many Americans embraced modern urban culture with its religious and ethnic pluralism, mass entertainment, and liberated sexual rules, others found it alarming. Many evangelical Protestants felt threatened by the decline of traditional values and the increased visibility of Catholicism and Judaism because of immigration. They also resented the growing presence within mainstream Protestant denominations of “modernists” who sought to integrate science and religion and adapt Christianity to the new secular culture. “The day is past,” declared Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of New York’s First Presbyterian Church and a prominent modernist, “when you can ask thoughtful men to hold religion in one compartment of their minds and their modern world view in another.” Convinced that the literal truth of the Bible formed the basis of Christian belief, fundamentalists launched a campaign to rid Protestant denominations T he C ulture Wars ★ 799 A 1923 lithograph by George Bellows captures the dynamic style of the most prominent evangelical preacher of the 1920s, Billy Sunday. of modernism and to combat the new individual freedoms that seemed to contradict traditional morality. Their most flamboyant apostle was Billy Sunday, a talented professional baseball player who became a revivalist preacher. Between 1900 and 1930, Sunday drew huge crowds with a highly theatrical preaching style and a message denouncing sins ranging from Darwinism to alcohol. He was said to have preached to 100 million people during his l ifetime—more than any other individual in history. Much of the press portrayed fundamentalism as a movement of backwoods bigots. In fact, it was a national phenomenon. Even in New York City, the center of the new modern culture, Fosdick was removed from his ministry in 1924 (whereupon John D. Rockefeller Jr. built the interdenominational Riverside Church for him). Fundamentalism remained an important strain of 1920s culture and politics. Prohibition, which fundamentalists strongly supported, succeeded in reducing the consumption of alcohol as well as public drunkenness and drink- related diseases. Often portrayed (especially in Hollywood movies) as a glamorous episode of gangland battles and drinkers easily outwitting the police, Prohibition in fact was effectively enforced, albeit selectively. While wealthy Americans continued to enjoy access to liquor, many poor, black, and immigrant communities suffered large-scale arrests and jailings, often accompanied by police violence. Later deemed an unmitigated failure, enforcement of Prohibition in fact led to the building of new federal prisons and laid the foundation for powerful national action against crime and immorality, a precursor to the more recent federal war on drugs. 800 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? Prohibition, however, remained a deeply divisive issue. The greatest expansion of national authority since Reconstruction, it raised major questions of local rights, individual freedom, and the wisdom of attempting to impose religious and moral values on the entire society through legislation. It divided the Democratic Party into “wet” and “dry” wings, leading to bitter battles at the party’s 1924 and 1928 national conventions. Too many Americans deemed Prohibition a violation of individual freedom for the flow of illegal liquor to stop. In urban areas, Prohibition led to large profits for the owners of illegal speakeasies and the “bootleggers” who supplied them. It produced widespread corruption as police and public officials accepted bribes to turn a blind eye to violations of the law. These developments reinforced fundamentalists’ identification of urban life and modern notions of freedom with immorality and a decline of Christian liberty. The Scopes Trial In 1925, a trial in Tennessee threw into sharp relief the division between traditional values and modern, secular culture. John Scopes, a teacher in a Tennessee public school, was arrested for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. His trial became a national sensation. The proceedings were even carried live on national radio. The Scopes trial reflected the enduring tension between two American definitions of freedom. Fundamentalist Christians, strongest in rural areas of the South and West, clung to the traditional idea of “moral” l iberty—voluntary adherence to time-honored religious beliefs. The theory that man had evolved over millions of years from ancestors like apes contradicted the biblical account of creation. Those who upheld the Tennessee law identified evolutionists with feminists, socialists, and religious modernists, all of whom, they claimed, substituted human judgment for the word of God. To Scopes’s defenders, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which had persuaded him to violate the law in order to test its constitutionality, freedom meant above all the right to independent thought and individual s elf-expression. To them, the Tennessee law offered a lesson in the dangers of religious intolerance and the merger of church and state. The renowned labor lawyer Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. The trial’s highlight came when Darrow called William Jennings Bryan to the stand as an “expert witness” on the Bible. Viewing the trial as a “duel to the death” between science and Christianity, he accepted Darrow’s challenge. But Bryan revealed an almost complete ignorance of modern science and proved unable to respond effectively to Darrow’s sarcastic questioning. Does the serpent really crawl on its belly as punishment for having tempted Eve in the Garden of Evil? When Bryan T he C ulture Wars ★ 801 answered “yes,” Darrow inquired how it got around before being cursed—on its tail? Asked whether God had actually created the world in six days, Bryan replied that these should be understood as ages, “not six days of twenty-four hours”—thus opening the door to the very nonliteral interpretation of the Bible fundamentalists rejected. The jury found Scopes guilty, A Ku Klux Klan gathering in Seattle, Washington, although the Tennessee Supreme in 1923. The unrobed members of the audience Court later overturned the decision are covering their faces to avoid identification. on a technicality. Shortly after the trial Unlike the Klan of the Reconstruction era, the second Ku Klux Klan was more powerful in the ended, Bryan died and the movement North and West than in the South. for anti-evolution laws disintegrated. Fundamentalists retreated for many years from battles over public education, preferring to build their own schools and colleges where teaching could be done as they saw fit and preachers were trained to spread their interpretation of Christianity. The battle would be rejoined, however, toward the end of the twentieth century, when fundamentalism reemerged as an important force in politics. To this day, the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools arouses intense debate in parts of the United States. The Second Klan Few features of urban life seemed more alien to rural and small-town native- born Protestants than their immigrant populations and cultures. The wartime obsession with “100 percent Americanism” continued into the 1920s, a decade of citizenship education programs in public schools, legally sanctioned visits to immigrants’ homes to investigate their household arrangements, and vigorous efforts by employers to instill appreciation for “American values.” Only “an agile and determined immigrant,” commented the Chicago Tribune, could “hope to escape Americanization by at least one of the many processes now being prepared for his special benefit.” In 1922, Oregon became the only state ever to require all students to attend public s chools—a measure aimed, said the state’s attorney general, at abolishing parochial education and preventing “bolshevists, syndicalists and communists” from organizing their own schools. Perhaps the most menacing expression of the idea that enjoyment of American freedom should be limited on religious and ethnic grounds was the 802 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had been reborn in Atlanta in 1915 after the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager accused of killing a teenage girl. By the mid-1920s, it claimed more than 3 million members, nearly all white, n ative-born Protestants, many of whom held respected positions in their communities. Unlike the Klan of Reconstruction, the organization now sank deep roots in parts of the North and West. It became the largest private organization in Indiana, and for a time controlled the state Republican Party. It was partly responsible for the Oregon law banning private schools. In southern California, its large marches and auto parades made the Klan a visible presence. The new Klan attacked a far broader array of targets than during Reconstruction. American civilization, it insisted, was endangered not only by blacks but by immigrants (especially Jews and Catholics) and all the forces (feminism, unions, immorality, even, on occasion, the giant corporations) that endangered “individual liberty.” Closing the Golden Door The Klan’s influence faded after 1925, when its leader in Indiana was convicted of assaulting a young woman. But the Klan’s attacks on modern secular culture and political radicalism and its demand that control of the nation be returned to “citizens of the old stock” reflected sentiments widely shared in the 1920s. The decade witnessed a flurry of legislation that offered a new answer to the venerable question “Who is an American?” In 1924, Congress declared all Native Americans born in the United States to be American citizens, although many western states continued to deny the vote to those living on reservations. Far more sweeping was a fundamental change in immigration policy. Immigration restriction had a long history. The Naturalization Act of 1790 had barred blacks and Asians from naturalization, with the ban lifted for the former in 1870. Beginning in 1875, various classes of immigrants had been excluded, among them prostitutes, the mentally retarded, and those with contagious diseases. Nonetheless, prior to World War I virtually all the white persons who wished to pass through the “golden door” into the United States and become citizens were able to do so. During the 1920s, however, the pressure for wholesale immigration restriction became irresistible. One index of the changing political climate was that large employers dropped their traditional opposition. Fears of immigrant radicalism now outweighed the desire for cheap unskilled labor, especially since mechanization had halted the growth of the industrial labor force and the Great Migration of World War I had accustomed industrialists to employing African-Americans. In 1921, a temporary measure restricted immigration from Europe to 357,000 per year (one-third of the annual average before the war). Three years T he C ulture Wars ★ 803 Table 20.1 Selected Annual Immigration Quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act Country Quota Immigrants in 1914 Northern and Western Europe: Great Britain and Northern Ireland 65,721 48,729 (Great Britain only) Germany 25,957 35,734 Ireland 17,853 24,688 (includes Northern Ireland) Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland) 7,241 29,391 Southern and Eastern Europe: Poland 6,524 (Not an independent state; included in Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) Italy 5,802 283,738 Russia 2,784 255,660 Other: Africa (total of various colonies and countries) 1,000 1,539 Western Hemisphere Asia (China, India, Japan, Korea) No quota limit 0 122,695 11,652 later, Congress permanently limited European immigration to 150,000 per year, distributed according to a series of national quotas that severely restricted the numbers from southern and eastern Europe. The Johnson-Reed, or Immigration, Act aimed to ensure that descendants of the old immigrants forever outnumbered the children of the new. However, to satisfy the demands of large farmers in California who relied heavily on seasonal Mexican labor, the 1924 law established no limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. The 1924 law also barred the entry of all those ineligible for naturalized citizenship—that is, the entire population of Asia, even though Japan had fought on the American side in World War I. The only Asians still able to enter the United States were residents of the Philippines, who were deemed to be “American nationals” (although not citizens) because the islands had been U.S. territory since the Spanish-American War. Largely to bar further Philippine immigration, Congress in 1934 established a timetable for the islands’ 804 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? independence, which was finally achieved in 1946. The 1934 law established an immigration quota of fifty Filipinos a year to the mainland United States, but allowed their continued entry into the Hawaiian Islands to work as plantation laborers. The law of 1924 established, in effect, for the first time a new c ategory—the illegal alien. With it came a new enforcement mechanism, the Border Patrol, charged with policing the land boundaries of the United States and empowered to arrest and deport persons who entered the country in violation of the new nationality quotas or other restrictions. Later associated almost exclusively with Latinos, “illegal aliens” at first referred mainly to southern and eastern Europeans who tried to sneak across the border from Mexico or Canada. Race and the Law The new immigration law reflected the heightened emphasis on “race” as a determinant of public policy. By the early 1920s, political leaders of both North and South agreed upon the relegation of blacks to second-class citizenship. In a speech in Alabama in 1921, President Harding unconsciously echoed W. E. B. Du Bois by affirming that the “problem” of race was a global one, not confined to the South. Unlike Du Bois, he believed the South showed the way to the problem’s solution. “It would be helpful,” he added, “to have that word ‘equality’ eliminated from this consideration.” Clearly, the Republican Party of the Civil War era was dead. But “race policy” meant far more than black-white relations. “America must be kept American,” declared President Coolidge in his annual message to Congress in 1923. His secretary of labor, James J. Davis, commented that immigration policy, once based on the need for labor and the notion of the United States as an asylum of liberty, must now rest on a biological definition of the ideal population. Although enacted by a highly conservative Congress strongly influenced by nativism, the 1924 immigration law also reflected the Progressive desire to improve the “quality” of democratic citizenship and to employ scientific methods to set public policy. It revealed how these aims were overlaid with p seudo-scientific assumptions about the superiority and inferiority of particular “races.” The seemingly “scientific” calculation of the new quotas—based on the “national origins” of the American population dating back to 1790—involved a highly speculative analysis of past census returns, with the results altered to increase allowable immigration by politically influential groups like I rish- Americans. N on-whites (one-fifth of the population in 1790) were excluded altogether when calculating quotas—otherwise, Africa would have received a far higher quota than the tiny number allotted to it. But then, the entire concept of race as a basis for public policy lacked any rational foundation. The T he C ulture Wars ★ 805 Supreme Court admitted as much in 1923 when it rejected the claim of Bhagat Singh Thind, an I ndian-born World War I veteran, who asserted that as a “pure Aryan,” he was actually white and could therefore become an American citizen. “White,” the Court declared, was not a scientific concept at all, but part of “common speech, to be interpreted with the understanding of the common man” (a forthright statement of what later scholars would call the “social construction” of race). Pluralism and Liberty During the 1920s, some Americans challenged the idea that southern and eastern Europeans were unfit to become citizens, or could only do so by abandoning their traditions in favor of A nglo-Saxon ways. Horace Kallen, himself of German-Jewish origin, in 1924 coined the phrase “cultural pluralism” to describe a society that gloried in ethnic diversity rather than attempting to suppress it. Toleration of difference was part of the “American Idea,” Kallen wrote. Anthropologists like Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Ruth Benedict insisted that no scientific basis existed for theories of racial superiority or for the notion that societies and races could be ranked on a fixed scale running from “primitive” to “civilized.” These writings, however, had little immediate impact on public policy. In the 1920s, the most potent defense of a pluralist vision of American society came from the new immigrants themselves. Every major city still contained ethnic enclaves with their own civic institutions, theaters, churches, and foreign-language newspapers. Their sense of separate identity had been heightened by the emergence of independent nation-states in eastern Europe after the war. It would be wrong, to be sure, to view ethnic communities as united in opposition to Americanization. In a society increasingly knit together by mass culture and a consumer economy, few could escape the pull of assimilation. The department store, dance hall, and motion picture theater were as much agents of Americanization as the school and workplace. From the perspective of many immigrant women, moreover, assimilation often seemed not so much the loss of an inherited culture as a loosening of patriarchal bonds and an expansion of freedom. But most immigrants resented the coercive aspects of Americanization programs, so often based on the idea of the superiority of Protestant mainstream culture. Promoting Tolerance In the face of immigration restriction, Prohibition, a revived Ku Klux Klan, and widespread anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, immigrant groups asserted the validity of cultural diversity and identified toleration of 806 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? ifference—religious, cultural, and individual—as the essence of American d freedom. In effect, they reinvented themselves as “ethnic” Americans, claiming an equal share in the nation’s life but, in addition, the right to remain in many respects culturally distinct. The Roman Catholic Church urged immigrants to learn English and embrace “American principles,” but it continued to maintain separate schools and other institutions. In 1924, the Catholic Holy Name Society brought 10,000 marchers to Washington to challenge the Klan and to affirm Catholics’ loyalty to the nation. Throughout the country, organizations like the A nti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (founded in 1916 to combat a nti- Semitism) and the National Catholic Welfare Council lobbied, in the name of “personal liberty,” for laws prohibiting discrimination against immigrants by employers, colleges, and government agencies. The Americanization movement, declared a Polish newspaper in Chicago, had “not the smallest particle of the true American spirit, the spirit of freedom, the brightest virtue of which is the broadest possible tolerance.” The efforts of immigrant communities to resist coerced Americanization and of the Catholic Church to defend its school system broadened the definition of liberty for all Americans. In landmark decisions, the Supreme Court struck down Oregon’s law, mentioned earlier, requiring all students to attend public schools and Nebraska’s prohibiting teaching in a language other than English—one of the anti-German measures of World War I. “The protection of the Constitution,” the decision in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) declared, “extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue,” a startling rebuke to enforced Americanization. The decision expanded the freedom of all immigrant groups. In its aftermath, federal courts overturned various Hawaii laws imposing special taxes and regulations on private Japanese-language schools. In these cases, the Court also interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal liberty to include the right to “marry, establish a home and bring up children” and to practice religion as one chose, “without interference from the state.” The decisions gave pluralism a constitutional foundation and paved the way for the Court’s elaboration, two generations later, of a constitutional right to privacy. The Emergence of Harlem The 1920s also witnessed an upsurge of self-consciousness among black Americans, especially in the North’s urban ghettos. With European immigration all but halted, the Great Migration of World War I continued apace. Nearly 1 million blacks left the South during the 1920s, and the black population of New York, Chicago, and other urban centers more than doubled. New York’s Harlem gained an international reputation as the “capital” of black America, T he C ulture Wars ★ 807 A black family arriving in Chicago in 1922, as part of the Great Migration from the rural South. a mecca for migrants from the South and immigrants from the West Indies, 150,000 of whom entered the United States between 1900 and 1930. Unlike the southern newcomers, most of whom had been agricultural workers, the West Indians included a large number of well-educated professional and white-collar workers. Their encounter with American racism appalled them. “I had heard of prejudice in America,” wrote the poet and novelist Claude McKay, who emigrated from Jamaica in 1912, “but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter.” The 1920s became famous for “slumming,” as groups of whites visited Harlem’s dance halls, jazz clubs, and speakeasies in search of exotic adventure. The Harlem of the white imagination was a place of primitive passions, free from the puritanical restraints of mainstream American culture. The real Harlem was a community of widespread poverty, its residents confined to low-wage jobs and, because housing discrimination barred them from other neighborhoods, forced to pay exorbitant rents. Most Harlem businesses were owned by whites; even the famed Cotton Club excluded black customers and employed only light-skinned dancers in its renowned chorus line. Few blacks, North or South, shared in the prosperity of the 1920s. 808 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? The Harlem Renaissance But Harlem also contained a vibrant black cultural community that established links with New York’s artistic mainstream. Poets and novelists like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay were befriended and sponsored by white intellectuals and published by white presses. Broadway for the first time presented black actors in serious dramatic roles, as well as shows like Dixie to Broadway and Blackbirds that featured great entertainers including the singers Florence Mills and Ethel Waters and the tap dancer Bill Robinson. At the same time, the theater flourished in Harlem, freeing black writers and actors from the constraints imposed by white producers. The term “New Negro,” associated in politics with pan-Africanism and the militancy of the Garvey movement, in art meant the rejection of established stereotypes and a search for black values to put in their place. This quest led the writers of what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance to the roots of the black experience—Africa, the rural South’s folk traditions, and the life of the urban ghetto. Claude McKay made the major character of his novel Home to Harlem (1928) a free spirit who wandered from one scene of exotic life to another in search of a beautiful girl he had known. W. E. B. Du Bois feared that a novel like McKay’s, with its graphic sex and violence, actually reinforced white prejudices about black life. Harlem Renaissance writings, however, also contained a strong element of protest. This mood was exemplified by McKay’s poem “If We Must Die,” a response to the race riots of 1919. The poem affirmed that blacks would no longer allow themselves to be murdered defenselessly by whites: If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. . . . Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! Winston Churchill would invoke McKay’s words to inspire the British public during World War II. The celebrated case of Ossian Sweet, a black physician who moved into a previously all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925, reflected the new spirit of assertiveness among many African-Americans. When a white mob attacked his home, someone (probably Sweet’s brother) fired into the crowd, killing a man. Indicted for murder along with his two brothers, Sweet was defended by Clarence Darrow, fresh from his participation in the Scopes trial. The jury proved unable to agree on a verdict. A second prosecution, of Sweet’s brother, ended in acquittal. T he C ulture Wars ★ 809 THE GREAT DEPRESSION The Election of 1928 Few men elected as president have seemed destined for a more successful term in office than Herbert Hoover. Born in Iowa in 1874, the son of a blacksmith and his schoolteacher wife, Hoover accumulated a fortune as a mining engineer working for firms in Asia, Africa, and Europe. During and immediately after World War I, he gained international fame by coordinating overseas food relief. The British economist John Maynard Keynes, a severe critic of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, called Hoover “the only man” to emerge from the peace conference “with an enhanced reputation.” He “had never known failure,” wrote the novelist Sherwood Anderson. Hoover seemed to exemplify what was widely called the “new era” of American capitalism. In 1922, while serving as secretary of commerce, he published American Individualism, which condemned government regulation as an interference with the economic opportunities of ordinary Americans, but also insisted that self-interest should be subordinated to public service. Hoover considered himself a Progressive, although he preferred what he called “associational action,” in which private agencies directed regulatory and welfare policies, to government intervention in the economy. After “silent Cal” Coolidge in 1927 handed a piece of paper to a group of reporters that stated, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928,” Hoover quickly emerged as his successor. Accepting the Republican nomination, Hoover celebrated the decade’s prosperity and promised that poverty would “soon be banished from this earth.” His Democratic opponent was Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party. Born into poverty on New York’s Lower East Side, Smith had become a fixture in Tammany Hall politics. Although he had no family connection with the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (his grandparents had emigrated from Ireland), Smith became their symbolic spokesman. The Triangle fire of 1911 made him an advocate of Progressive social legislation. He served three terms as governor of New York, securing passage of laws limiting the hours of working women and children and establishing widows’ pensions. Smith denounced the Red Scare and called for the repeal of Prohibition. His bid for the Democratic nomination in 1924 had been blocked by delegates beholden to nativists and Klansmen, but he secured the nod four years later. Given the prevailing prosperity and his own sterling reputation, Hoover’s victory was inevitable. Other than on Prohibition, moreover, the Democratic platform did not d iffer much from the Republican one, leaving little to discuss except the candidates’ personalities and religions. Smith’s Catholicism became the focus of the race. Many Protestant ministers and religious 810 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the government’s responses by 1932? publications denounced him for his faith. For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans carried several southern states, reflecting the strength of anti- Catholicism and nativism among religious fundamentalists. “Hoover,” wrote one previously D emocratic southern newspaper editor, “is sprung from American soil and stock,” while Smith represented “the aliens.” On the other hand, Smith carried the nation’s twelve largest cities and won significant support in economically struggling farm areas. With more than 58 percent of the vote, Hoover was elected by a landslide. But Smith’s campaign helped to lay the foundation for the triumphant Democratic coalition of the 1930s, based on urban ethnic voters, farmers, and the South. The Coming of the Depression On October 21, 1929, President Hoover traveled to Michigan to take part in the Golden Anniversary of the Festival of Light, organized by Henry Ford to commemorate the invention of the lightbulb by Thomas Edison fifty years earlier. Hoover’s speech was a tribute to progress, and especially to the businessmen and scientists from whose efforts “we gain constantly in better standards of living, more stability of employment . . . and decreased suffering.” Eight days later, on Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed. As panic selling set in, more than $10 billion in market value (equivalent to more than ten times that amount in today’s money) vanished in five hours. Soon, the United States and, indeed, the entire world found themselves in the grip of the Great Depression, the greatest economic disaster in modern history. The stock market crash did not, by itself, cause the Depression. Even before 1929, signs of economic trouble had become evident. Southern California and Florida experienced frenzied r eal-estate speculation and then spectacular busts, with banks failing, land remaining undeveloped, and mortgages foreclosed. The highly unequal distribution of income and the prolonged depression in farm regions reduced American purchasing power. Sales of new autos and household consumer goods stagnated after 1926. European demand for American goods also declined, partly because industry there had recovered from wartime destruction. A fall in the bloated stock market, driven ever higher during the 1920s by speculators, was inevitable. But it came with such severity that it destroyed many of the investment companies that had been created to buy and sell stock, wiping out thousands of investors, and it greatly reduced business and consumer confidence. Around 26,000 businesses failed in 1930. Those that survived cut back on further investment and began laying off workers. The global financial system, which was based on the gold standard, was ill equipped to deal with the downturn. Germany defaulted on reparations payments to France and The G reat D epression ★ 811 Britain, leading these governments to stop repaying debts to American banks. Throughout the industrial world, banks failed as depositors withdrew money, fearful that they could no longer count on the promise to redeem paper money in gold. Millions of families lost their life savings. Although stocks recovered somewhat in 1930, they soon resumed their relentless downward slide. Between 1929 and 1932, the price of a share of U.S. Steel fell from $262 to $22, and General Motors from $73 to $8. F our-fifths of the Rockefeller family fortune disappeared. William C. Durant, one of the founders of General Motors, lost all his money and ended up running a bowling alley in Flint, Michigan. In 1932, the economy hit rock bottom. Since 1929, the gross national product (the value of all the goods and services in the country) had fallen by one-third, prices by nearly 40 percent, and more than 11 million Americans—25 percent of the labor force—could not find work. U.S. Steel, which had employed 225,000 full-time workers in 1929, had none at the end of 1932, when it was operating at only 12 percent of capacity. Those who retained their jobs confronted reduced hours and dramatically reduced wages. Every industrial economy suffered, but the United States, which had led the way in prosperity in the 1920s, was hit hardest of all. Americans and the Depression The Depression transformed American life. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the road in search of work. Hungry men and women lined the streets of major cities. In Detroit, 4,000 children stood in bread lines each day seeking food. Thousands of families, evicted from their homes, moved into ramshackle shantytowns, dubbed Hoovervilles, that sprang up in parks and on abandoned land. Cities quickly spent the little money they had available for poor relief. In Chicago, where half the working population was unemployed at the beginning of 1932, Mayor Anton Cermak telephoned people individually, begging them to pay their taxes. “We saw want and despair walking the streets,” wrote a Chicago social worker, “and our friends, sensible, thrifty families, reduced to poverty.” When the Soviet Union advertised its need for skilled workers, it received more than 100,000 applications from the United States. The Depression actually reversed the l ong-standing movement of population from farms to cities. Many Americans left cities to try to grow food for their families. In 1935, 33 million people lived on f arms—more than at any previous point in American history. But rural areas, already poor, saw families reduce the number of meals per day and children go barefoot. With the future shrouded in uncertainty, the American suicide rate rose to the highest level in the nation’s history, and the birthrate fell to the lowest. 812 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the government’s responses by 1932? “The American way of life,” the confident slogan of the consumer culture, and common sayings like “safe as a bank” took on a hollow ring. The image of big business, carefully cultivated during the 1920s, collapsed as congressional investigations revealed massive irregularities committed by bankers and stockbrokers. Banks had knowingly sold worthless bonds. Prominent Wall Streeters had unloaded their own portfolios while advising small investors to maintain their holdings. Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, was convicted of stealing from customers, including from a fund to aid widows and orphans. He ended up in jail. Resignation and Protest The celebrated photographer Dorothea Lange took this photograph of an unemployed man on a San Francisco breadline in 1933. Many Americans reacted to the Depression with resignation or blamed themselves for economic misfortune. Others responded with protests that were at first spontaneous and uncoordinated, since unions, socialist organizations, and other groups that might have provided disciplined leadership had been decimated during the 1920s. In the spring of 1932, 20,000 unemployed World War I veterans descended on Washington to demand early payment of a bonus due in 1945, only to be driven away by federal soldiers led by the army’s chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur. Throughout the country, the unemployed demonstrated for jobs and public relief. That summer, led by the charismatic Milo Reno, a former Iowa Populist, the National Farmers’ Holiday Association protested low prices by temporarily blocking roads in the Midwest to prevent farm goods from getting to market. Only the minuscule Communist Party seemed able to give a political focus to the anger and despair. “The most fully employed persons I met during the Depression,” one labor leader later recalled, “were the Communists.” They “brought misery out of hiding,” forming unemployed councils, sponsoring marches and demonstrations for public assistance, and protesting the eviction of unemployed families from their homes. The press discussed the idea that the United States was on the verge of a revolution. The insurance firm Lloyd’s of London reported an upsurge in American requests for riot insurance. The The G reat D epression ★ 813 Hoover administration in 1931 opposed efforts to save money by reducing the size of the army, warning that this would “lessen our means of maintaining domestic peace and order.” Hoover’s Response In the eyes of many Americans, President Hoover’s response to the Depression seemed inadequate and uncaring. Leading advisers, including Andrew Mellon, the wealthy secretary of the treasury, told Hoover that economic downturns were a normal part of capitalism, which weeded out unproductive firms and encouraged moral virtue among the less fortunate. Businessmen strongly opposed federal aid to the unemployed, and many Communist Party headquarters in New York City, publications called for individual “belt- 1932. The banners illustrate the variety of activities the party organized in the early 1930s. tightening” as the road to recovery. Some initially saw a silver lining in the Depression. Wages had fallen so sharply, reported Fortune magazine, that “you can have your garden taken care of in Los Angeles for $1 a week” or hire an “affable Negro to fry your chicken and do your washing for $8 a month in Virginia.” The federal government had never faced an economic crisis as severe as the Great Depression. Few political leaders understood how important consumer spending had become in the American economy. Most held to the conventional view that government intervention to aid those who had lost their jobs would do little to spur economic recovery and would encourage Americans to rely on government charity to address misfortune. In 1931, Hoover quoted former president Grover Cleveland from four decades earlier: “The Government should not support the people. . . . Federal aid . . . weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” Strongly opposed on principle to direct federal intervention in the economy, Hoover remained committed to “associational action.” He put his faith in voluntary steps by business to maintain investment and e mployment— something few found it possible to d o—and efforts by local charity organizations to assist needy neighbors. He called numerous conferences of business and labor leaders and established commissions to encourage firms to cooperate in maintaining prices and wages without governmental dictation. Hoover attempted to restore public confidence, making frequent public statements that “the tide had turned.” But these made him increasingly seem out of touch 814 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the government’s responses by 1932? with reality. About the unemployed men who appeared on city streets offering apples at five cents apiece, Hoover would later write, “Many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” The Worsening Economic Outlook Some administration remedies, like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which Hoover signed with some reluctance in 1930, made the economic situation worse. Raising the already high taxes on imported goods, it inspired similar increases abroad, further reducing international trade. A tax increase Hoover pushed through Congress in 1932 in an attempt to balance the federal budget further reduced Americans’ purchasing power. Other initiatives inspired ridicule. When he approved funds to provide food for livestock, one observer remarked that the president would feed “jackasses but . . . not starving babies.” By 1932, Hoover had to admit that voluntary action had failed to stem the Depression. He signed laws creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which loaned money to failing banks, railroads, and other businesses, and the Federal Home Loan Bank System, which offered aid to homeowners threatened with foreclosure. Having vetoed previous bills to create employment through public-works projects like road and bridge construction, he now approved a measure appropriating nearly $2 billion for such initiatives and helping to fund local relief efforts. These were dramatic departures from previous federal economic policy. But further than this, Hoover would not go. He adamantly opposed offering direct relief to the u nemployed—it would do them a “disservice,” he told Congress. Freedom in the Modern World In 1927, the New School for Social Research in New York City organized a series of lectures on the theme of Freedom in the Modern World. Founded eight years earlier as a place where “free thought and intellectual integrity” could flourish in the wake of wartime repression, the school’s distinguished faculty included the philosopher John Dewey and historian Charles Beard (who had resigned from Columbia University in 1917 to protest the dismissal of antiwar professors). The lectures painted a depressing portrait of American freedom on the eve of the Great Depression. “The idea of freedom,” declared economist Walton H. Hamilton, had become “an intellectual instrument for looking backward. . . . Liberty of contract has been made the b e-all and e nd-all of personal freedom; . . . the domain of business has been defended against control from without in the name of freedom.” The free exchange of ideas, moreover, had not recovered from the crisis of World War I. The “sacred dogmas of patriotism and Big Business,” said the educator Horace Kallen, dominated teaching, the press, The G reat D epression ★ 815 and public debate. A definition of freedom reigned supreme that celebrated the unimpeded reign of economic enterprise yet tolerated the surveillance of private life and individual conscience. The prosperity of the 1920s had reinforced this definition of freedom. With the economic crash, compounded by the ineffectiveness of the Hoover administration’s response, it would be discredited. By 1932, the seeds had already been planted for a new conception of freedom that combined two different elements in a sometimes uneasy synthesis. One was the Progressive belief in a socially conscious state making what Dewey called “positive and constructive changes” in economic arrangements. The other, which arose in the 1920s, centered on respect for civil liberties and cultural pluralism and declared that realms of life like group identity, personal behavior, and the free expression of ideas lay outside legitimate state concern. These two principles would become the hallmarks of modern liberalism, which during the 1930s would redefine American freedom. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. H ow did consumerism and the idea of the “American way of life” affect people’s understanding of American values, including the meaning of freedom, in the 1920s? 2. Which groups did not share in the prosperity of the 1920s and why? 3. H ow did business practices and policies lead to a decline in union membership in the 1920s? 4. P resident Calvin Coolidge said that “the chief business of the American people is business.” How did the federal government’s policies and practices in the 1920s reflect this understanding of the importance of business interests? 5. W ho supported restricting immigration in the 1920s and why? Why were they more successful in gaining federal legislation to limit immigration in these years? 6. D id U.S. society in the 1920s reflect the concept of cultural pluralism as explained by Horace Kallen? Why or why not? 7. Identify the causes of the Great Depression. 8. W hat principles guided President Hoover’s response to the Great Depression, and how did this restrict his ability to help the American people? 9. W hat issues were of particular concern to r eligious fundamentalists in these years and why? 10. In what ways did the ideas about (and the reality of) proper roles for women change in these years? 816 ★ CHAPTER 20 Fr om Bus i nes s Cul tur e t o G re a t D e p re s s i o n KEY TERMS Sacco-Vanzetti case (p. 780) Scopes trial (p. 801) Equal Rights Amendment (p. 787) illegal alien (p. 805) flappers (p. 788) New Negro (p. 809) Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (p. 791) Harlem Renaissance (p. 809) Teapot Dome (p. 791) Great Depression (p. 811) McNary-Haugen bill (p. 794) stock market crash (p. 811) American Civil Liberties Union (p. 797) Smoot-Hawley Tariff (p. 815) Schenck v. United States (p. 798) Reconstruction Finance Corporation (p. 815) fundamentalism (p. 800) Go to Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 817 ★ CHAPTER 21 ★ THE NEW DEAL 1932–1940 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days? • Who were the main proponents of economic justice in the 1930s, and what measures did they advocate? • What were the major initiatives of the Second New Deal, and how did they differ from the First New Deal? • How did the New Deal recast the meaning of American freedom? • How did New Deal benefits apply to women and minorities? • How did the Popular Front influence American culture in the 1930s? E arly in 1941, the unemployed Woody Guthrie, soon to become one of the country’s most popular songwriters and folk singers, brought his family to Portland, Oregon. He hoped to star in a film about the great public-works projects under way on the Columbia River. Given a temporary job by the Bonneville Power Authority, the public agency that controlled the Columbia dams, Guthrie produced a song every day for the next month. One, “Roll on, Columbia,” became a popular statement of the benefits that resulted when government took the lead in improving the lot of ordinary citizens: 818 ★ C O L U M B I A R I V E R B A S I N P R O J E C T, 1 9 4 9 . R Payette Madis on R. M O U N T A I N S tes R. Deschu Hells Canyon Dam (proposed) S A I N N T O U C A S C A D E M Willa mette R. Y R. E N G R A Salmon . yR . IDAHO Boise Coa Sn ak eR OREGON 50 50 T McNary Dam (building) a John D 0 K Lewiston O . The Dalles Dam (proposed) RO Four Navigation Dams (authorized) John Day Dam (proposed) iR Helena MONTANA R R. Snake Yak R ia 0 C E e st R ange O T ng Priest Rapids Dam (proposed) im aR . Bonneville Dam IT Ra Portland Hungry Horse Dam (building) Libby Dam (proposed) Albeni Falls Dam (proposed) B st Pa c i f i c Ocean Glacier View Dam (proposed) . Rock Island Dam Tacoma Colu mb Astoria Spokane Grand Coulee Dam iR R Coa WASHINGTON Seattle na M i ss ou r Chief Joseph Dam (building) ot e Ko e R. Pend Oreill CANADA . Pocatello 100 miles 100 kilometers A 1949 map of the Columbia River project, showing its numerous dams, including the Grand Coulee, the largest man-made structure in the world at the time of its opening in 1941. And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam, The mightiest thing ever built by a man, To run the great factories and water the land, It’s, roll on, Columbia, roll on. . . . Your power is turning our darkness to dawn. So, roll on, Columbia, roll on. © The Columbia River winds its way on a 1,200-mile course from Canada through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific Ocean. Because of its steep descent from uplands to sea level, it produces an immense amount of energy. Residents of the economically underdeveloped Pacific Northwest had long dreamed of tapping this unused energy for electricity and irrigation. But not until the 1930s did the federal government launch the program of dam T H E N E W D E A L ★ 819 • CHRONOLOGY • 1931 Scottsboro case 1933 Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated president Bank holiday The Hundred Days and the First New Deal 21st Amendment ratified 1934 Huey Long launches the Share Our Wealth movement American Liberty League established Herbert Hoover’s The Challenge to Liberty 1934– 1940 Height of the Dust Bowl 1935 Second New Deal launched Supreme Court rules the National Recovery Association unconstitutional John L. Lewis organizes the Congress of Industrial Organizations 1936 Supreme Court rules the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional New Deal coalition leads to Democratic landslide John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 1936– 1937 United Auto Workers sitdown strike 1938 House Un-American Activities Committee established Fair Labor Standards Act passed 1939 John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath • • construction that transformed the region. The project created thousands of jobs for the unemployed, and the network of dams produced abundant cheap power. When the Grand Coulee Dam went into operation in 1941, it was the largest manmade structure in world history. It eventually produced more than 40 percent of the nation’s hydroelectric power. The dam provided the cheapest electricity in the country for towns that sprang up out of nowhere, farms on what had once been deserts in eastern Washington and Oregon, and factories that would soon be producing aluminum for World War II airplanes. The project also had less appealing consequences. From time immemorial, the Columbia River had been filled with salmon. But the Grand Coulee Dam made no provision for the passage of fish, and the salmon all but vanished. This caused little concern during the Depression but became a source of controversy later in the century as Americans became more attuned to preserving the natural environment. The Grand Coulee Dam was part of what one scholar has called a “public works revolution” that transformed the American economy and landscape during the 1930s. The Roosevelt administration spent far more money on building roads, dams, airports, bridges, and housing than on any other activity. Franklin D. Roosevelt believed regional economic development like that in the Northwest would promote e conomic growth, ease the domestic and working lives of ordinary Americans, and keep control of key natural resources in public rather than private hands. “It promises,” one supporter wrote, “a world replete with more freedom and happiness than mankind has ever known.” 820 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days? The Columbia River project reflected broader changes in American life and thought during the New Deal of the 1930s. Roosevelt oversaw the transformation of the Democratic Party into a coalition of farmers, industrial workers, the reformminded urban middle class, liberal intellectuals, northern African-Americans, and, somewhat incongruously, the white supremacist South, united by the belief that the federal government must provide Americans with protection against the dislocations caused by modern capitalism. “Liberalism,” traditionally understood as limited government and free-market economics, took on its modern meaning. Thanks to the New Deal, it now referred to active efforts by the national government to modernize and regulate the market economy and to uplift less fortunate members of society. Freedom, too, underwent a transformation during the 1930s. The Depression had discredited the ideas that social progress rests on the unrestrained pursuit of wealth and that, apart from unfortunates like widows and orphans, most poverty is self-inflicted. The New Deal elevated a public guarantee of economic security to the forefront of American discussions of freedom. The 1930s were a decade of dramatic social upheaval. Social and political activists, most notably a revitalized labor movement, placed new issues on the political agenda. When one writer in 1941 published a survey of democratic thought beginning in the ancient world, he concluded that what distinguished his own time was its awareness of “the social conditions of freedom.” Thanks to the New Deal, he wrote, “economic security” had “at last been recognized as a political condition of personal freedom.” Regional economic development like that in the Northwest reflected this understanding of freedom. So did other New Deal measures, including the Social Security Act, which offered aid to the unemployed and aged, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a national minimum wage. Yet while the New Deal significantly expanded the meaning of freedom, it did not erase freedom’s boundaries. Its benefits flowed to industrial workers but not tenant farmers, to men far more fully than women, and to white Americans more than blacks, who, in the South, still were deprived of the basic rights of citizenship. THE FIRST NEW DEAL FDR and the Election of 1932 It is indeed paradoxical that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been raised in privilege on a New York country estate, came to be beloved as the symbolic representative of ordinary citizens. But like Lincoln, with whom he is often TH E F I R S T N E W D E A L ★ 821 compared, Roosevelt’s greatness lay in his willingness to throw off the “dogmas of the quiet past” (Lincoln’s words) to confront an unprecedented national crisis. FDR, as he liked to be called, was born in 1882, a fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt. He graduated from Harvard in 1904 and six years later won election to the New York legislature from Duchess County, site of his family’s home at Hyde Park. After serving as undersecretary of the navy during World War I, he ran for vice president on the ill-fated Democratic ticket of 1920 headed by James M. Cox. In 1921, he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs, a fact carefully concealed from the public in that pre-television era. Very few Americans realized that the president who projected an image of vigorous leadership during the 1930s and World War II was confined to a wheelchair. In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1932, Roosevelt promised a “new deal” for the American people. But his campaign offered only vague hints of what this might entail. Roosevelt spoke of the government’s responsibility to guarantee “every man . . . a right to make a comfortable living.” But he also advocated a balanced federal budget and criticized his opponent, President Hoover, for excessive government spending. The biggest difference between the parties during the campaign was the Democrats’ call for the repeal of Prohibition, although Roosevelt certainly suggested a greater awareness of the plight of ordinary Americans and a willingness to embark on new ways to address the Great Depression. Battered by the economic crisis, Americans in 1932 were desperate for new leadership, and Roosevelt won a resounding victory. He received 57 percent of the popular vote, and Democrats swept to a commanding majority in Congress. The Coming of the New Deal The Depression did not produce a single pattern of international public response. For nearly the entire decade of the 1930s, conservative governments ruled Britain and France. They were more interested in preserving public order than relieving suffering or embarking on policy innovations. In Germany, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, established one of the most brutal dictatorships in human history. Hitler banned all political opposition and launched a reign of terror against Jews and others deemed to be “un-German.” In the Soviet Union, another tyrant, Joseph Stalin, embarked on successive five-year plans that at great social cost produced rapid industrialization and claimed to have eliminated unemployment. Roosevelt conceived of the New Deal as an alternative to socialism on the left, Nazism on the right, and the inaction of upholders of unregulated capitalism. He hoped to reconcile democracy, individual liberty, and economic recovery and development. “You have made yourself,” the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR, “the trustee for those in every country who 822 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days? seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system.” If Roosevelt failed, Keynes added, the only remaining choice would be between “orthodoxy” (that is, doing nothing) and “revolution.” Roosevelt did not enter office with a blueprint for dealing with the Depression. At first, he relied heavily for advice on a group of intellectuals and social workers who took up key positions in his administration. They included S ecretary of Labor Frances Perkins, a veteran of Hull House and the New York Consumers’ League who had been among the eyewitnesses to the Triangle fire of 1911; Harry Hopkins, who had headed emergency relief efforts during Roosevelt’s term as governor of New York; Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a veteran of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive campaign of 1912; and Louis Brandeis, who had advised Woodrow Wilson during the 1912 campaign and now offered political advice to FDR while serving on the Supreme Court. The presence of these individuals reflected how Roosevelt drew on the reform traditions of the Progressive era. But Progressivism, as noted in Chapter 18, was hardly a unified movement, and Roosevelt’s advisers did not speak with one voice. Brandeis believed that large corporations not only wielded excessive power but also had contributed to the Depression by keeping prices artificially high and failing to increase workers’ purchasing power. They should be broken up, he insisted, not regulated. But the “brains trust”—a group of academics that included a number of Columbia University professors—saw bigness as inevitable in a modern economy. The competitive marketplace, they argued, was a thing of the past, and large firms needed to be managed and directed by the government, not dismantled. Their view prevailed during what came to be called the First New Deal. The Banking Crisis “This nation asks for action and action now,” Roosevelt announced on taking office on March 4, 1933. The country, wrote the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, “was in such a state of confused desperation that it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose to go.” FDR spent much of 1933 t rying to reassure the public. In his inaugural address, he declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” (See the Appendix for the full text.) Roosevelt confronted a banking system on the verge of collapse. As bank funds invested in the stock market and corporate bonds lost their value and panicked depositors withdrew their savings, bank after bank had closed its doors. By March 1933, banking had been suspended in a majority of the states— that is, people could not gain access to money in their bank accounts. Roosevelt The F irst N ew D eal ★ 823 declared a “bank holiday,” temporarily halting all bank operations, and called Congress into special session. On March 9, it rushed to pass the Emergency Banking Act, which provided funds to shore up threatened institutions. Further measures soon followed that transformed the American financial system. The Glass-Steagall Act barred commercial banks from becoming involved in the buying and selling of stocks. Until its repeal in the 1990s, the law prevented many of the irresponsible practices that had contributed to the stock market crash. The same law established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a government system that insured the accounts of individual depositors. And Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard— that is, he severed the link between the country’s currency and its gold reserves, thus making possible the issuance of more money in the hope of stimulating business activity. Together, these measures rescued the financial system and greatly increased the government’s power over it. About 5,000 banks—onethird of the nation’s total—had failed between 1929 and 1933, representing a loss of tens of millions of dollars to depositors. In 1936, not a single bank failed in the United States. The NRA The Emergency Banking Act was the first of an unprecedented flurry of legislation during the first three months of Roosevelt’s administration, a period known as the Hundred Days. Seizing on the sense of crisis and the momentum of his electoral victory, Roosevelt won rapid passage of laws he hoped would promote economic recovery. He persuaded Congress to create a host of new agencies, whose initials soon became part of the language of politics—NRA, AAA, CCC. Never in American history had a president exercised such power in peacetime or so rapidly expanded the role of the federal government in people’s lives. The centerpiece of Roosevelt’s plan for combating the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act, was to a large extent modeled on the government–business partnership established by the War Industries Board of World War I, although in keeping with FDR’s nondogmatic approach, it also owed something to Herbert Hoover’s efforts to build stronger government– business cooperation. Roosevelt called it “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.” The act established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which would work with groups of business leaders to establish industry codes that set standards for output, prices, and working conditions. Thus, “cutthroat” competition (in which companies took losses to drive competitors out of business) would be ended. These industry-wide arrangements would be exempt from antitrust laws. 824 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days? The NRA reflected how even in its early days, the New Deal reshaped nderstandings of freedom. In effect, FDR had repudiated the older idea of u liberty based on the idea that the best way to encourage economic activity and ensure a fair distribution of wealth was to allow market competition to operate, unrestrained by the government. And to win support from labor, section 7a of the new law recognized the workers’ right to organize unions—a departure from the “open shop” policies of the 1920s and a step toward government support for what workers called “industrial freedom.” Headed by Hugh S. Johnson, a retired general and businessman, the NRA quickly established codes that set standards for production, prices, and wages in the textile, steel, mining, and auto industries. Johnson launched a publicity campaign to promote the NRA and its symbol, the Blue Eagle, which stores and factories that abided by the codes displayed. But after initial public enthusiasm, the NRA became mired in controversy. Large companies dominated the code-writing process. An inquiry conducted by the labor lawyer Clarence Darrow in 1934 concluded that they used the NRA to drive up prices, limit production, lay off workers, and divide markets among themselves at the expense of smaller competitors. Many anti-union employers ignored section 7a. The government lacked the manpower to police the 750 codes in effect by 1935. The NRA produced neither economic recovery nor peace between employers and workers. It did, however, help to undercut the pervasive sense that the federal government was doing nothing to deal with the economic crisis. Government Jobs The Hundred Days also brought the government into providing relief to those in need. Roosevelt and most of his advisers shared the widespread fear that direct government payments to the unemployed would undermine individual self-reliance. Indeed, one of the first measures of the Hundred Days had been the Economy Act, which reduced federal spending in an attempt to win the confidence of the business community. But with nearly a quarter of the workforce unemployed, spending on relief was unavoidable. In May 1933, Congress created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, to make grants to local agencies that aided those impoverished by the Depression. FDR, however, much preferred to create temporary jobs, thereby combating unemployment while improving the nation’s infrastructure of roads, bridges, public buildings, and parks. In March 1933, Congress established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which set unemployed young men to work on projects like forest preservation, flood control, and the improvement of national parks and wildlife preserves. By the time the program ended in 1942, more than 3 million The F irst N ew D eal ★ 825 persons had passed through CCC camps, where they received government wages of $30 per month. The CCC made a major contribution to the enhancement of the American environment. Public-Works Projects One section of the National Industrial Recovery Act created the Public Works Administration (PWA), with an appropriation of $3.3 billion. Directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, it contracted with private construction companies to build roads, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities, including New York City’s Triborough Bridge and the Overseas Highway between Miami and Key West, Florida. In November 1933, yet another agency, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), was launched. Unlike the PWA, it directly hired workers for construction projects. By January 1934, it employed more than 4 million persons in the construction of highways, tunnels, courthouses, and airports. But as the cost spiraled upward and complaints multiplied that the New Deal was creating a class of Americans permanently dependent on government jobs, Roosevelt ordered the CWA dissolved. Some New Deal public-works initiatives looked to government-planned economic transformation as much as economic relief. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), another product of the Hundred Days, built a series of dams to prevent floods and deforestation along the Tennessee River and to provide cheap electric power for homes and factories in a seven-state region where many families still lived in isolated log cabins. The TVA put the federal government, for the first time, in the business of selling electricity in competition with private companies. It significantly improved the lives of many southerners and offered a preview of the program of regional planning that spurred the economic development of the West. The New Deal and Agriculture Another policy initiative of the Hundred Days addressed the disastrous plight of American farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) authorized the federal government to set production quotas for major crops and pay farmers to plant less in an attempt to raise farm prices. Many crops already in the field were destroyed. In 1933, the government ordered more than 6 million pigs slaughtered as part of the policy, a step critics found strange at a time of widespread hunger. The AAA succeeded in significantly raising farm prices and incomes. But not all farmers benefited. Money flowed to property-owning farmers, ignoring the large number who worked on land owned by others. The AAA policy of paying 826 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days? T H E T E N N E S S E E VA L L E Y A U T H O R I T Y r O hio Rive Paducah Riv er Mi ssis sipp i Clinch River SOUTH HOLSTON DALE HOLLOW mb ndRiver erla Cu CENTER HILL Nashville T E N N E S S E E PICKWICK LANDING Corinth WILSON Oak Ridge Huntsville N O RT H Asheville C A RO L I NA French Broad River SOUTH Little C A RO L I NA Tennessee River Ten ne ss GUNTERSVILLE Tupelo HIWASSEE Chattanooga ee Muscle Shoals Knoxville DOUGLAS FORT LOUDOUN FONTANA CHICKAMAUGA HALES BAR WHEELER BOONE WATAUGA CHEROKEE NORRIS WATTS BAR Riv er Memphis Powell River WOLF CREEK Tennessee River MISSOURI Holston River K E N T U C K Y KENTUCKY GEORGIA A L A BA M A MISSISSIPPI 0 0 50 50 Birmingham Atlanta 100 Miles 100 Kilometers Principal TVA dams Area served by TVA electric power A map showing the reach of the Tennessee Valley Authority, covering all or parts of seven southeastern states. Numerous reservoirs and power plants dot the landscape. landowning farmers not to grow crops encouraged the eviction of thousands of poor tenants and sharecroppers. Many joined the rural exodus to cities or to the farms of the West Coast. The onset in 1930 of a period of unusually dry weather in the nation’s heartland worsened the Depression’s impact on rural America. By m id-decade, the region suffered from the century’s most severe drought. Mechanized agriculture in this semiarid region had pulverized the topsoil and killed native grasses that prevented erosion. Winds now blew much of the soil away, creating the Dust Bowl, as the affected areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado were called. A local newspaper described the situation in Cimarron County, Oklahoma: “Not a blade of wheat; cattle dying on the range, ninety percent of the poultry dead because of the sand storms, milk cows gone dry.” One storm in 1934 carried dust as far as Washington, D.C. The drought and dust storms displaced more than 1 million farmers. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of The F irst N ew D eal ★ 827 THE DUST BOWL, 1935–1940 WYOMING UTAH Denver Topeka COLORADO AZ IOWA NEBRASKA KANSAS MISSOURI OKLAHOMA Santa Fe Oklahoma City ARKANSAS NEW MEXICO TEXAS MEXICO 0 0 100 200 miles 100 200 kilometers Severe wind erosion in 1935–1936 Severe wind erosion in 1938 Severe wind erosion in 1940 Most severe wind erosion in 1935–1938 LA Austin Gulf of Mexico Wrath (1939) and a popular film based on the book captured their plight, tracing a dispossessed family’s trek from Oklahoma to California. Another New Deal initiative, the Resettlement Administration, established in 1934, sought to relocate rural and urban families suffering from the Depression to communities planned by the federal government. Headed by Columbia University economist Rexford G. Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s advisers, it set up relief camps for migrant workers in California (many of whom had been displaced by the dust storms) and built several new communities, including Greenbelt just outside Washington, D.C. The New Deal and Housing Owning one’s home had long been a widely shared American ambition. “A man is not a whole and complete man,” Walt Whitman had written in the 1850s, “unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.” For many members of the middle class, home ownership had become a mark of respectability. For workers, it offered economic security at a time of low wages, erratic employment, and limited occupational mobility. On the eve of World War I, a considerably higher percentage of immigrant workers than the native-born middle class owned their homes. The Depression devastated the American housing industry. The construction of new residences all but ceased, and banks and savings and loan associations that had financed home ownership collapsed or, to remain afloat, foreclosed on many homes (a quarter of a million in 1932 alone). In 1931, President Hoover convened a Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership to review the housing crisis. The president called owning a home an American “birthright,” the embodiment of the spirit of “enterprise, of independence, and of . . . freedom.” Rented apartments, he pointed out, did not inspire “immortal ballads” like Home, Sweet Home or The Little Gray Home in the West. Papers presented at the conference revealed that millions of Americans lived in overcrowded, unhealthy urban slums or in ramshackle rural dwellings. Private enterprise alone, it seemed clear, was unlikely to solve the nation’s housing crisis. 828 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days? Hoover’s administration established a federally sponsored bank to issue home loans. Not until the New Deal, however, did the government systematically enter the housing market. Roosevelt spoke of “the security of the home” as a fundamental right akin to “the security of livelihood, and the security of social insurance.” In 1933 and 1934, his administration moved energetically to protect home owners from foreclosure and to stimulate new construction. The Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured millions of long-term mortgages issued by private banks. At the same time, the federal government itself built thousands of units of low-rent housing. New Deal housing policy represented a remarkable departure from previous government practice. Thanks to the FHA and, later, the Veterans’ Administration, home ownership came within the reach of tens of millions of families. It became cheaper for most Americans to buy single-family homes than to rent apartments. Other important measures of Roosevelt’s first two years in office included the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed Prohibition; the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission to oversee the nation’s broadcast airwaves and telephone communications; and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock and bond markets. Taken together, the First New Deal was a series of experiments, some of which succeeded and some of which did not. They transformed the role of the federal government, constructed numerous public facilities, and provided relief to millions of needy persons. Public employment rescued millions of Americans from the ravages of the Depression. But while the economy improved somewhat, sustained recovery had not been achieved. Some 10 million A mericans—more than 20 percent of the workforce—remained unemployed when 1934 came to an end. The Court and the New Deal In 1935, the Supreme Court, still controlled by conservative Republican judges who held to the nineteenth-century understanding of freedom as liberty of contract, began to invalidate key New Deal laws. First came the NRA, declared unconstitutional in May in a case brought by the Schechter Poultry Company of Brooklyn, which had been charged with violating the code adopted by the chicken industry. In a unanimous decision, the Court declared the NRA unlawful because in its codes and other regulations it delegated legislative powers to the president and attempted to regulate local businesses that did not engage in interstate commerce. In January 1936, the AAA fell in United States v. Butler, which declared it an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power over The F irst N ew D eal ★ 829 local economic activities. In June, by a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that New York could not establish a minimum wage for women and children. Having failed to end the Depression or win judicial approval, the First New Deal ground to a halt. Meanwhile, pressures were mounting outside Washington that propelled the administration toward more radical departures in policy. THE GRASSROOTS REVOLT Labor’s Great Upheaval The most striking development of the mid-1930s was the mobilization of millions of workers in mass-production industries that had successfully resisted unionization. “Labor’s great upheaval,” as this era of unprecedented militancy was called, came as a great surprise. Unlike in the past, however, the federal government now seemed to be on the side of labor, a commitment embodied in the National Industrial Recovery Act and in the Wagner Act (discussed later) of 1935, which granted workers the legal right to form unions. With the severe reduction of European immigration, ethnic differences among workers had diminished in importance. American-born children of the new immigrants now dominated the industrial labor force, and organizers no longer had to distribute materials in numerous languages as the IWW had done. And a cadre of militant labor leaders, many of them socialists and communists with long experience in organization, had survived the repression of the 1920s. They provided leadership to the labor upsurge. American factories at the outset of the New Deal were miniature dictatorships in which unions were rare, workers could be beaten by supervisors and fired at will, and management determined the length of the workday and speed of the assembly line. In industrial communities scattered across the country, local government firmly supported the companies. “Jesus Christ couldn’t speak in Duquesne for the union,” declared the mayor of that Pennsylvania steel town. Workers’ demands during the 1930s went beyond better wages. They included an end to employers’ arbitrary power in the workplace, and basic civil liberties for workers, including the rights to picket, distribute literature, and meet to discuss their grievances. All these goals required union recognition. Roosevelt’s election as president did much to rekindle hope among those who called themselves, in the words of a worker writing to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, “slaves of the depression.” His inauguration unleashed a flood of poignant letters to the federal government describing what a Louisiana sugar laborer called the “terrible and inhuman condition” of many workers. Labor 830 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal Who were the main proponents of economic justice in the 1930s, and what measures did they advocate? organizers spread the message that the “political liberty for which our forefathers fought” had been “made meaningless by economic inequality” and “industrial despotism.” “We are free Americans,” declared the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. “We shall exercise our inalienable rights to organize into a great industrial union.” Labor’s great upheaval exploded in 1934, a year that witnessed no fewer Signs carried by striking cotton mill workers in than 2,000 strikes. Many produced vio- Lumberton, North Carolina, in 1937 illustrate how the labor movement revived the nineteenth- lent confrontations between workers century language of “wage slavery” to demand and the local police. In Toledo, Ohio, union recognition. 10,000 striking auto workers surrounded the Electric Auto-Lite factory, where managers had brought strikebreakers to take their jobs, leading to a seven-hour fight with police and the National Guard. In Minneapolis, where an organization of businessmen known as the Citizens Alliance controlled the city government, a four-month strike by truck drivers led to pitched battles in the streets and the governor declaring martial law. San Francisco experienced the country’s first general strike since 1919. It began with a walkout of dockworkers led by the fiery communist Harry Bridges. Workers demanded recognition of the International Longshoremen’s Association and an end to the hated “shape up” system in which they had to gather en masse each day to wait for work assignments. The year 1934 also witnessed a strike of 400,000 textile workers in states from New England to the Deep South, demanding recognition of the United Textile Workers. Many of these walkouts, including those in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, won at least some of the workers’ demands. But the textile strike failed. The Rise of the CIO The labor upheaval posed a challenge to the American Federation of Labor’s traditional policy of organizing workers by craft—welders or machine repairers, for example—rather than seeking to mobilize all the workers in a given industry, such as steel manufacturing. In 1934, thirty AFL leaders called for the creation of unions of industrial workers. When the AFL convention of 1935 refused, the head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, led a walkout that produced a new labor organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It set out to create unions in the main bastions of the American The G rassroots R evolt ★ 831 economy. It aimed, said Lewis, at nothing less than to secure “economic freedom and industrial democracy” for American workers—a fair share in the wealth produced by their labor, and a voice in determining the conditions under which they worked. In December 1936, unions, most notably the United Auto Workers (UAW), a fledgling CIO union, unveiled the sit-down, a strikingly effective tactic that the IWW had pioneered three decades earlier. Rather than walking out of a plant, thus enabling management to bring in strikebreakers, workers halted production but remained inside. In the UAW’s first sit-down strike, 7,000 General Motors workers seized control of the Fisher Body Plant in Cleveland. Sit-downs soon spread to GM plants in Flint, Michigan, the nerve center of automobile production. When local police tried to storm the Flint plants, workers fought them off. Democratic governor Frank Murphy, who had been elected with strong support from the CIO, declared his unwillingness to use force to dislodge the strikers. The strikers demonstrated a remarkable spirit of unity. They cleaned the plant, oiled the idle machinery, settled disputes among themselves, prepared meals, and held concerts of labor songs. Workers’ wives shuttled food into the plant. “They made a palace out of what had been their prison,” wrote one reporter. On February 11, General Motors agreed to negotiate with the UAW. Not until 1941 would the bitterly anti-union Henry Ford sign a labor contract. But by the end of 1937, the UAW claimed 400,000 members. The victory in the auto industry reverberated throughout industrial America. Steelworkers had suffered memorable defeats in the struggle for unionization, notably at Homestead in 1892 and in the Great Steel Strike of 1919. U.S. Steel, the country’s single most important business firm, owner of an industrial empire that stretched across several states and employed more than 200,000 workers, had been among the strongest opponents of unionization. But in March 1937, fearing a sit-down campaign and aware that it could no longer count on the aid of state and federal authorities, the company agreed to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (forerunner of the United Steelworkers of America). Smaller steel firms, however, refused to follow suit. On Memorial Day, 1937, company guards and Chicago police fired on a picnic of striking Republic Steel workers, killing ten persons. Not until 1942 would Republic sign a labor contract. Union membership reached 9 million by 1940, more than double the number in 1930. The coming of the union, said a member of New York City’s transit workers’ organization, enabled workers “to go to our bosses and talk to them like men, instead of . . . like slaves.” Unions demanded and won a say in w orkplace management, including the right to contest the amount and pace of work and the introduction of new technology. They gained new grievance procedures and seniority systems governing hiring, firing, and promotions. The CIO unions 832 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal Who were the main proponents of economic justice in the 1930s, and what measures did they advocate? helped to stabilize a chaotic employment situation and offered members a sense of dignity and freedom. Labor and Politics Throughout the industrial heartland, the labor upsurge altered the balance of economic power and propelled to the forefront of politics labor’s goal of a fairer, freer, more equal America. Unlike the AFL, traditionally hostile to government intervention in labor-management relations, the CIO put forward an ambitious program for federal action to shield Americans from economic and social insecurity, including public housing, universal health care, and unemployment and old age insurance. Building on the idea, so prominent in the 1920s, that the key to prosperity lay in an American standard of living based on mass consumption, CIO leaders explained the Depression as the result of an imbalance of wealth and income. The role of unions, in cooperation with the government, they argued, was to “create a consumer’s demand” by raising wages and redistributing wealth. Only in this way could society absorb the products that rolled off modern assembly lines. The pathbreaking 1937 agreement between the UAW and General Motors spoke of a “rate of pay commensurate with an American standard of l iving.” By mid-decade, many New Dealers accepted the “underconsumptionist” explanation of the Depression, which saw lack of sufficient consumer demand as its underlying cause. They concluded that the government must act to raise dramatically wage earners’ share of the national income. Voices of Protest Other popular movements of the mid-1930s also placed the question of economic justice on the political agenda. In California, the novelist Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1934 as the head of the End Poverty in California movement. Sinclair called for the state to use idle factories and land in cooperative ventures that would provide jobs for the unemployed. He lost the election after being subjected to one of the first modern “negative” media campaigns. Sinclair’s opponents circulated false newsreels showing armies of unemployed men marching to California to support his candidacy and a fake endorsement from the Communist Party. The rise to national prominence of Huey Long offered another sign of popular dissatisfaction with the slow pace of economic recovery. Long’s career embodied both Louisiana’s Populist and Socialist traditions (Winn Parish, his home, had voted for both of these third parties) and the state’s heritage of undemocratic politics. Driven by intense ambition and the desire to help uplift the state’s “common people,” Long won election as governor in 1928 and in 1930 took a seat in the U.S. Senate. From Washington, he dominated every branch of The G rassroots R evolt ★ 833 state government. He used his dictatorial power to build roads, schools, and hospitals and to increase the tax burden on Louisiana’s oil companies. One of the most colorful characters in twentieth-century American politics, Long was referred to by both admirers and critics as the “Kingfish.” In 1934, he launched the Share Our Wealth movement, with the slogan “Every Man a King.” He called for the confiscation of most of the wealth of the richest Americans in order to finance an immediate grant of $5,000 and a guaranteed job and annual income for all citizens. In his inimitable style, Long explained his goal: “Let’s pull down these huge piles of gold until there shall be a real job, not a little old sow-belly, black-eyed pea job but a real spending money, beefsteak Huey Long, the “Kingfish” of Louisiana politics, in full rhetorical flight. The photo was probably and gravy . . . Ford in the garage . . . taken in 1934, when Long was in the U.S. Senate red, white, and blue job for every man.” but still running the state government. Long claimed a following of 5 million. He was on the verge of announcing a run for president when the son of a defeated political rival assassinated him in 1935. Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician, meanwhile won wide support for a plan by which the government would make a monthly payment of $200 to older Americans, with the requirement that they spend it immediately. This, he argued, would boost the economy. By the end of 1934, Townsend Clubs claimed more than 2 million members. Along with the rise of the CIO, these signs of popular discontent helped to spark the Second New Deal. Religion on the Radio Also in the mid-1930s, the “radio priest,” Father Charles E. Coughlin, attracted millions of listeners with weekly broadcasts attacking Wall Street bankers and greedy capitalists, and calling for government ownership of key industries as a way of combating the Depression. Initially a strong supporter of FDR, Coughlin became increasingly critical of the president for what he considered the failure of the New Deal to promote social justice. His crusade would later shift to anti-Semitism and support for European fascism. 834 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major initiatives of the Second New Deal, and how did they differ from the First New Deal? Other religious leaders of various denominations took advantage of the mass media to spread their beliefs. Ironically, many fundamentalists used the most modern techniques of communication, including the radio and popular entertainment, to promote their anti-modernist message. They found in the radio a way of bringing their views directly to ordinary Americans, bypassing established churches and their leaders. During the 1920s, Aimee Semple McPherson, a Los Angeles revivalist, had her own radio station, which broadcast sermons from the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel she had founded. McPherson also traveled the country as a revivalist preacher. Her sermons used elaborate sets, costumes, and special effects borrowed from the movie industry. By the 1940s, national religious broadcast networks emerged, with a reliable and dedicated listening audience. In later decades, fundamentalist Christians would take advantage of television and the Internet to disseminate their religious and political views. THE SECOND NEW DEAL In 1935, President Roosevelt sent a message to 100,000 American clergymen asking about economic and social conditions in their communities. The responses indicated that their financially hard-pressed churches could not respond effectively via traditional charity to the massive needs of their congregations. Spurred by the failure of his initial policies to pull the country out of the Depression and the growing popular clamor for greater economic equality, and buoyed by Democratic gains in the midterm elections of 1934, Roosevelt in 1935 launched the Second New Deal. The first had focused on economic recovery. The emphasis of the second was economic security—a guarantee that Americans would be protected against unemployment and poverty. “Boys,” Roosevelt’s relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, told his staff, “this is our hour. We’ve got to get everything we want—a [public] works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never.” The idea that lack of consumer demand caused the Depression had been popularized by Huey Long, Francis Townsend, and the CIO. More and more New Dealers concluded that the government should no longer try to plan business recovery but should try to redistribute the national income so as to sustain mass purchasing power in the consumer economy. A series of measures in 1935 attacked head-on the problem of weak demand and economic inequality. Congress levied a highly publicized tax on large fortunes and corporate profits—a direct response to the popularity of Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth campaign. It created the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) to bring The S econd N ew D eal ★ 835 electric power to homes that lacked it—80 percent of farms were still without electricity in 1934—in part to enable more Americans to purchase household appliances. The REA proved to be one of the Second New Deal’s most successful programs. By 1950, 90 percent of the nation’s farms had been wired for electricity, and almost all now possessed radios, electric stoves, refrigerators, and mechanical equipment to milk cows. In addition, the federal government under the Second New Deal tried to promote soil conservation and family farming. This effort resulted from the belief that the country would never achieve prosperity so long as farmers’ standard of living lagged well behind that of city dwellers, and that rural poverty resulted mainly from the poor use of natural resources. Thus, farmers received federal assistance in reducing soil loss in their fields. The federal government also purchased significant amounts of marginal and eroded land and converted these areas from farms into national grasslands and parks. It encouraged more environmentally conscious agricultural techniques. These measures (like those of the AAA) mainly benefited landowners, not sharecroppers, tenants, or migrant workers. In the long run, the Second New Deal failed to arrest the trend toward larger farms and fewer farmers. The WPA and the Wagner Act In 1934, Roosevelt had severely curtailed federal employment for those in need. Now, he approved the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired some 3 million Americans, in virtually every walk of life, each year until it ended in 1943. Under Harry Hopkins’s direction, the WPA changed the physical face of the United States. It constructed thousands of public buildings and bridges, more than 500,000 miles of roads, and 600 airports. It built stadiums, swimming pools, and sewage treatment plants. Unlike previous work relief programs, the WPA employed many out-of-work white-collar workers and professionals, even doctors and dentists. Perhaps the most famous WPA projects were in the arts. The WPA set hundreds of artists to work decorating public buildings with murals. It hired writers to produce local histories and guidebooks to the forty-eight states and to record the recollections of ordinary Americans, including hundreds of former slaves. Its Federal Theater Project put on plays, including an all-black production of Macbeth and Sinclair Lewis’s drama It Can’t Happen Here, about fascism coming to the United States. The Federal Music Project established orchestras and choral groups, and the Federal Dance Project sponsored ballet and modern dance programs. Thanks to the WPA, audiences across the country enjoyed their first glimpse of live musical and theatrical performances and their first 836 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What were the major initiatives of the Second New Deal, and how did they differ from the First New Deal? pportunity to view exhibitions of American art. Also in 1935, Congress c reated o the National Youth Administration to provide relief to American teenagers and young adults. Another major initiative of the Second New Deal, the Wagner Act, was known at the time as “Labor’s Magna Carta” (a reference to an early landmark in the history of freedom). This brought democracy into the American workplace by empowering the National Labor Relations Board to supervise elections in which employees voted on union representation. It also outlawed “unfair labor practices,” including the firing and blacklisting of union organizers. The bill’s main sponsor, Robert Wagner of New York, told the Senate that the ability of workers to pool their strength through collective bargaining represented the “next step” in “the evolution of American freedom.” He also promised that unionization and higher wages would aid economic recovery by boosting the purchasing power of ordinary Americans. The American Welfare State The centerpiece of the Second New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935. It embodied Roosevelt’s conviction that the national government had a responsibility to ensure the material well-being of ordinary Americans. It created a system of unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and aid to the disabled, the elderly poor, and families with dependent children. None of these were original ideas. The Progressive platform of 1912 had called for old age pensions. Assistance to poor families with dependent c hildren descended from the mothers’ pensions promoted by maternalist reformers. Many European countries had already adopted national unemployment insurance plans. What was new, however, was that in the name of economic security, the American government would now supervise not simply temporary relief but a permanent system of social insurance. The Social Security Act launched the American version of the welfare state—a term that originated in Britain during World War II to refer to a system of income assistance, health coverage, and social services for all citizens. The act illustrated both the extent and the limits of the changes ushered in by the Second New Deal. The American welfare state marked a radical departure from previous government policies, but compared with similar programs in Europe, it has always been far more decentralized, involved lower levels of public spending, and covered fewer citizens. The original Social Security bill, for example, envisioned a national system of health insurance. But Congress dropped this after ferocious opposition from the American Medical Association, which feared government regulation of d octors’ activities and incomes. The S econd N ew D eal ★ 837 The Social Security System Some New Dealers desired a program funded by the federal government’s general tax revenues, and with a single set of eligibility standards administered by national officials. But Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, along with powerful members of Congress, wished to keep relief in the hands of state and local authorities and believed that workers should contribute directly to the cost of their own benefits. Roosevelt himself preferred to fund Social Security by taxes on employers and workers, rather than out of general government revenues. He wanted to ensure that Social Security did not add to the federal deficit and believed that paying such taxes gave contributors “a legal, moral, and political right” to collect their old age pensions and unemployment benefits, which no future Congress could rescind. As a result, Social Security emerged as a hybrid of national and local funding, control, and eligibility standards. Old age pensions were administered nationally but paid for by taxes on employers and employees. Such taxes also funded payments to the unemployed, but this program was highly decentralized, with the states retaining considerable control over the level of benefits. The states paid most of the cost of direct poor relief, under the program called Aid to Dependent Children, and eligibility and the level of payments varied enormously from place to place. As will be discussed later, the combination of local administration and the fact that domestic and agricultural workers were not covered by unemployment and old age benefits meant that Social Security at first excluded large numbers of Americans, especially unmarried women and non-whites. Nonetheless, Social Security represented a dramatic departure from the traditional functions of government. The Second New Deal transformed the relationship between the federal government and American citizens. Before the 1930s, national political debate often revolved around the question of whether the federal government should intervene in the economy. After the New Deal, debate rested on how it should intervene. In addition, the government assumed a responsibility, which it has never wholly relinquished, for guaranteeing Americans a living wage and protecting them against economic and personal misfortune. “Laissez-faire is dead,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “and the modern state has become responsible for the modern economy [and] the task of insuring . . . the standard of life for its people.” A RECKONING WITH LIBERT Y The Depression made inevitable, in the words of one writer, a “reckoning with liberty.” For too many Americans, Roosevelt proclaimed, “life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of 838 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did the New Deal recast the meaning of American freedom? happiness.” The 1930s produced an outpouring of books and essays on freedom. The large majority took for granted the need for a new definition. In a volume entitled Land of the Free (1938), the poet Archibald MacLeish used photographs of impoverished migrants and sharecroppers to question the reality of freedom in desperate times. “We told ourselves we were free,” he wrote. Now, “we wonder if the liberty is done . . . or if there’s something different men can mean by Liberty.” Like the Civil War, the New Deal recast the idea of freedom by linking it to the expanding power of the national state. “Our democracy,” wrote Father John A. Ryan, a prominent Catholic social critic, “finds itself . . . in a new age where not political freedom but social and industrial freedom is the most insistent cry.” Influenced by Ryan, the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1935 declared that “social justice” required a government guarantee of continuous employment and a “decent livelihood and adequate security” for all Americans. FDR and the Idea of Freedom Along with being a superb politician, Roosevelt was a master of political communication. At a time when his political opponents controlled most newspapers, he harnessed radio’s power to bring his message directly into American homes. By the mid-1930s, more than two-thirds of American families owned radios. They listened avidly to Roosevelt’s radio addresses, known as “fireside chats.” Roosevelt adeptly appealed to traditional values in support of new policies. He gave the term “liberalism” its modern meaning. In the nineteenth century, liberalism had been a shorthand for limited government and free-market economics. Roosevelt consciously chose to employ it to describe a large, active, socially conscious state. He reclaimed the word “freedom” from conservatives and made it a rallying cry for the New Deal. In his second fireside chat, Roosevelt juxtaposed his own definition of liberty as “greater security for the average man” to the older notion of liberty of contract, which served the interests of “the privileged few.” Henceforth, he would consistently link freedom with economic security and identify entrenched economic inequality as its greatest enemy. “The liberty of a democracy,” he declared in 1938, was not safe if citizens could not “sustain an acceptable standard of living.” Even as Roosevelt invoked the word to uphold the New Deal, “liberty”— in the sense of freedom from powerful government—became the fighting slogan of his opponents. Their principal critique of the New Deal was that its “reckless spending” undermined fiscal responsibility and its new government regulations restricted American freedom. When conservative businessmen and politicians in 1934 formed an organization to mobilize opposition A Reckoning with L iberty ★ 839 FDR delivering one of his “fireside chats” in 1938. Roosevelt was the first president to make effective use of the radio to promote his policies. to Roosevelt’s policies, they called it the American Liberty League. Robert Taft of Ohio, leader of the Republicans in Congress, accused Roosevelt of sacrificing “individual freedom” in a misguided effort to “improve the conditions of the poor.” As the 1930s progressed, opponents of the New Deal invoked the language of liberty with greater and greater passion. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged FDR with attempting to “Sovietize” America. Even though his own administration had abandoned laissez-faire in the face of economic disaster, former president Hoover launched strident attacks on his successor for endangering “fundamental American liberties.” In The Challenge to Liberty (1934), Hoover called the New Deal “the most stupendous invasion of the whole spirit of liberty” the nation had ever seen. The Election of 1936 By 1936, with working-class voters providing massive majorities for the Democratic Party and businesses large and small bitterly estranged from the New Deal, politics reflected class divisions more completely than at any other time in American history. Conceptions of freedom divided sharply as well. Americans, wrote George Soule, editor of The New Republic, confronted “two opposing systems of concepts about liberty,” reflecting “the needs and purposes of two opposing [parts] of the population.” One was the idea of “freedom for private enterprise,” the other “socialized liberty” based on “an equitably shared abundance.” A fight for the possession of “the ideal of freedom,” reported the New York Times, emerged as the central issue of the presidential campaign of 1936. The Democratic platform insisted that in a modern economy the government has an obligation to establish a “democracy of opportunity for all the people.” In his speech accepting renomination, Roosevelt launched a blistering attack against “economic royalists” who, he charged, sought to establish a new tyranny over 840 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did the New Deal recast the meaning of American freedom? the “average man.” Economic rights, he went on, were the precondition of liberty—poor men “are not free men.” Throughout the campaign, FDR would insist that the threat posed to economic freedom by the “new despotism” of large corporations was the main issue of the election. As Roosevelt’s opponent, Republicans chose Kansas governor Alfred Landon, a former Theodore Roosevelt Progressive. Landon denounced Social Security and other measures as threats to individual liberty. Opposition to the New Deal planted the seeds for the later flowering of an antigovernment conservatism bent on upholding the free market and dismantling the welfare state. But in 1936 Roosevelt won a landslide reelection, with more than 60 percent of the popular vote. He carried every state except Maine and Vermont. Roosevelt’s victory was all the more remarkable in view of the heavy support most of the nation’s newspapers and nearly the entire business community gave to the Republicans. His success stemmed from strong backing from organized labor and his ability to unite southern white and northern black voters, Protestant farmers and urban Catholic and Jewish ethnics, industrial workers and middle-class home owners. These groups made up the so-called New Deal coalition, which would dominate American politics for nearly half a century. The Court Fight Roosevelt’s second inaugural address was the first to be delivered on January 20. In order to lessen a newly elected president’s wait before taking office, the recently ratified Twentieth Amendment had moved inauguration day from March 4. FDR called on the nation to redouble its efforts to aid those “who have too little.” The Depression, he admitted, had not been conquered: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.” Emboldened by his electoral triumph, Roosevelt now made what many considered a serious political miscalculation. On the pretense that several members of the Supreme Court were too old to perform their functions, he proposed that the president be allowed to appoint a new justice for each one who remained on the Court past age seventy (an age that six of the nine had already surpassed). FDR’s aim, of course, was to change the balance of power on a Court that, he feared, might well invalidate Social Security, the Wagner Act, and other measures of the Second New Deal. The plan aroused cries that the president was an aspiring dictator. Congress rejected it. But Roosevelt accomplished his underlying purpose. The Supreme Court, it is sometimes said, follows the election returns. Coming soon after Roosevelt’s landslide victory of 1936, the threat of “Court packing” inspired an astonishing about-face on the part of key justices. Beginning in March 1937, the Court suddenly revealed a new willingness to support economic regulation A Reckoning with L iberty ★ 841 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat” (1934) President Roosevelt pioneered the use of the new mass medium of radio to speak directly to Americans in their homes. He used his “fireside chats” to mobilize support for New Deal programs, link them with American traditions, and outline his definition of freedom. To those who say that our expenditures for public works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that in the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. . . . In our efforts for recovery we have avoided, on the one hand, the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all-embracing Government. We have avoided, on the other hand, the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help. The course we have followed fits the American practice of Government, a practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet concrete needs, a practice of courageous recognition of change. I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that “the legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.” I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America. From John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (1938) John Steinbeck’s popular novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and the film version that followed shortly thereafter, focused national attention on the plight of homeless migrants displaced from their farms as a result of the Great Depression. Before that book appeared, Steinbeck had published a series of newspaper articles based on eyewitness accounts of the migrants, which became the basis for his novel. 842 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal In California, we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and they are hated. . . . The migrants are hated for the following reasons, that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the season’s crops. . . . Let us see what kind of people they are, where they come from, and the routes of their wanderings. In the past they have been of several races, encouraged to come and often imported as cheap labor. Chinese in the early period, then Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. These were foreigners, and as such they were ostracized and segregated and herded about. . . . But in recent years the foreign migrants have begun to organize, and at this danger they have been deported in great numbers, for there was a new reservoir from which a great quantity of cheap labor could be obtained. The drought in the middle west has driven the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and Texas westward. . . . Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept any pay so that they may eat and feed their children. . . . The earlier foreign migrants have invariably been drawn from a peon class. This is not the case with the new migrants. They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or farm hands who have lived with the family in the old American way. . . . They have come from the little farm districts where democracy was not only possible but inevitable, where popular government, whether practiced in the Grange, in church QU E STIONS organization or in local government, was the responsibility of every man. And 1. What does Roosevelt mean by the difference they have come into the country where, between the definition of liberty that has because of the movement necessary to existed in the past and his own “broader make a living, they are not allowed any definition of liberty”? vote whatever, but are rather considered 2. According to Steinbeck, how do a properly unprivileged class. . . . Depression-era migrant workers differ As one little boy in a squatter’s camp from those in earlier periods? said, “When they need us they call us migrants, and when we’ve picked their 3. Do the migrant workers described by Steincrop, we’re bums and we got to get out.” beck enjoy liberty as Roosevelt understands it? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 843 by both the federal government and the states. It upheld a minimum wage law of the state of Washington similar to the New York measure it had declared unconstitutional a year earlier. It turned aside challenges to Social Security and the Wagner Act. In subsequent cases, the Court affirmed federal power to regulate wages, hours, child labor, agricultural production, and numerous other aspects of economic life. Announcing a new judicial philosophy, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes pointed out that the words “freedom of contract” did not appear in the Constitution. “Liberty,” however, did, and this, Hughes continued, required “the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people.” The Court’s new willingness to accept the New Deal marked a permanent change in judicial policy. Having declared dozens of economic laws unconstitutional in the decades leading up to 1937, the justices have rarely done so since. The End of the Second New Deal Even as the Court made its peace with Roosevelt’s policies, the momentum of the Second New Deal slowed. The landmark United States Housing Act did pass in 1937, initiating the first major national effort to build homes for the poorest Americans. But the Fair Labor Standards bill failed to reach the floor for over a year. When it finally passed in 1938, it banned goods produced by child labor from interstate commerce, set forty cents as the minimum hourly wage, and required overtime pay for hours of work exceeding forty per week. This last major piece of New Deal legislation established the practice of federal regulation of wages and working conditions, another radical departure from pre-Depression policies. The year 1937 also witnessed a sharp downturn of the economy. With economic conditions improving in 1936, Roosevelt had reduced federal funding for farm subsidies and WPA work relief. The result was disastrous. As government spending fell, so did business investment, industrial production, and the stock market. Unemployment, still 14 percent at the beginning of 1937, rose to nearly 20 percent by year’s end. In 1936, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes had challenged economists’ traditional belief in the sanctity of balanced budgets. Large-scale government spending, he insisted, was necessary to sustain purchasing power and stimulate e conomic activity during downturns. Such spending should be enacted even at the cost of a budget deficit (a situation in which the government spends more money than it takes in). By 1938, Roosevelt was ready to follow this prescription, which would later be known as 844 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did New Deal benefits apply to women and minorities? THE LIMITS OF CHANGE F I G U R E 2 1 . 1 U N E M P L O Y M E N T, 1925–1945 Percentage of civilian labor force unemployed Keynesian economics. In April, he asked Congress for billions more for work relief and farm aid. By the end of the year, the immediate crisis had passed. But the events of 1937–1938 marked a major shift in New Deal philosophy. Rather than economic planning, as in 1933–1934, or economic redistribution, as in 1935–1936, public spending would now be the government’s major tool for combating unemployment and stimulating economic growth. The Second New Deal had come to an end. 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1925 1927 1930 1933 1936 1939 1942 1945 Year The New Deal did not really solve the problem of Roosevelt conceived of the Second New unemployment, which fell below 10 percent only Deal, and especially Social Security, as in 1941, as the United States prepared to enter expanding the meaning of freedom by World War II. extending assistance to broad groups of needy Americans—the unemployed, elderly, and dependent—as a right of citizenship, not charity or special privilege. But political realities, especially the power of inherited ideas about gender and black disenfranchisement in the South, powerfully affected the drafting of legislation. New Deal programs were justified as ways of bringing economic security to “the people” rather than to specific disadvantaged groups. But different Americans experienced the New Deal in radically different ways. The New Deal and American Women The New Deal brought more women into government than ever before in American history. A number of talented women, including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, advised the president and shaped public policy. Most prominent of all was Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s distant cousin whom he had married in 1905. She transformed the role of First Lady, turning a position with no formal responsibilities into a base for political action. She traveled widely, spoke out on public issues, wrote a regular newspaper column that sometimes disagreed openly with her husband’s policies, and worked to enlarge the scope of the New Deal in areas like civil rights, labor legislation, and work relief. The L imits of C hange ★ 845 But even as the New Deal increased women’s visibility in national politics, organized feminism, already in disarray during the 1920s, disappeared as a political force. Indeed, the Depression inspired widespread demands for women to remove themselves from the labor market to make room for unemployed men. Because the Depression hit industrial employment harder than low-wage clerical and service jobs where women predominated, the proportion of the workforce made up of women rose. The government tried to reverse this trend. The Economy Act of 1933 prohibited both members of a married couple from holding federal jobs. Until its repeal in 1937, it led to the dismissal of numerous female civil service employees whose husbands worked for the government. Many states and localities prohibited the hiring of women whose husbands earned a “living wage,” and employers from banks to public school systems barred married women from jobs. Although the CIO organized female workers, it, too, adhered to the idea that women should be supported by men. “The working wife whose husband is employed,” said a vice president of the United Auto Workers, “should be barred from industry.” Most New Deal programs did not exclude women from benefits (although the CCC restricted its camps to men). But the ideal of the male-headed household powerfully shaped social policy. Since paying taxes on one’s wages made one eligible for the most generous Social Security programs—old age pensions and unemployment insurance—they left most women uncovered, since they did not work outside the home. The program excluded the 3 million mostly female domestic workers altogether. “Those who need protection most are completely overlooked,” the sister of a household worker complained to Secretary of Labor Perkins. “What about the poor domestics, both in private homes and private institutions. What have you done for them? Nothing.” The Southern Veto Roosevelt made the federal government the symbolic representative of all the people, including racial and ethnic groups generally ignored by previous administrations. Yet the power of the Solid South helped to mold the New Deal welfare state into an entitlement of white A mericans. After the South’s blacks lost the right to vote around the turn of the century, Democrats enjoyed a political monopoly in the region. Democratic members of Congress were elected again and again. With results predetermined, many whites did not bother to vote (only about 20 percent of eligible southern voters cast ballots in the election of 1920). But this tiny electorate had an enormous impact on national policy. Committee chairmanships in Congress rest on seniority— how many years a member has served in office. Beginning in 1933, when Democrats took control of Congress, southerners assumed the key leadership 846 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did New Deal benefits apply to women and minorities? positions. Despite his personal popularity, Roosevelt felt he could not challenge the power of southern Democrats if he wished legislation to pass. At their insistence, the Social Security law excluded agricultural and domestic workers, the largest categories of black employment. Roosevelt spoke of Social Security’s universality, but the demand for truly comprehensive coverage came from the political left and black organizations. Congressman Ernest Lun- A 1936 photograph shows a black farmer, with deen of Minnesota in 1935 introduced his son, repaying a loan from the Farm S ecurity a bill establishing a federally con- Administration, which sought to improve the trolled system of old age, unemploy- conditions of poor landowning farmers and sharecroppers. The client wears what is probably ment, and health benefits for all wage his nicest attire to meet with the government workers, plus support for female heads official. of households with dependents. Black organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP supported the Lundeen bill and lobbied strenuously for a system that enabled a gricultural and domestic workers to receive unemployment and old age benefits and that established national relief standards. The Social Security Act, however, not Lundeen’s proposal, became law. Its limitations, complained the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, reflected the power of “reactionary elements in the South who cannot bear the thought of Negroes getting pensions and compensations” and who feared that the inclusion of black workers would disrupt the region’s low-wage, racially divided labor system. The Stigma of Welfare Because of the “southern veto,” the majority of black workers found themselves confined to the least generous and most vulnerable wing of the new welfare state. The public assistance programs established by Social Security, notably aid to dependent children and to the poor elderly, were open to all Americans who could demonstrate financial need. But they set benefits at extremely low levels and authorized the states to determine eligibility standards, including “moral” behavior as defined by local authorities. As a result, public assistance programs allowed for widespread discrimination in the distribution of benefits. Because recipients did not pay Social Security taxes, they came to bear the The L imits of C hange ★ 847 humiliating stigma of dependency on government handouts, which would soon come to be known as “welfare.” In 1942, the National Resources Planning Board noted that because of their exclusion from programs “which give aid under relatively favorable conditions,” blacks were becoming disproportionately dependent on welfare, a program widely viewed with popular disfavor. The situation, the report concluded, seemed certain to stigmatize blacks as recipients of unearned government assistance, and welfare as a program for minorities, thus dooming it forever to inadequate “standards of aid.” Over time, this is precisely what happened, until the federal government abolished its responsibility for welfare in 1996 entirely, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. The Indian New Deal Overall, the Depression and New Deal had a contradictory impact on A merica’s racial minorities. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the administration launched an Indian New Deal. Collier ended the policy of forced assimilation and allowed Indians unprecedented cultural autonomy. He replaced boarding schools meant to eradicate the tribal heritage of Indian children with schools on reservations, and dramatically increased spending on Indian health. He secured passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, ending the policy, dating back to the Dawes Act of 1887, of dividing Indian lands into small plots for individual families and selling off the rest. Federal authorities once again recognized Indians’ right to govern their own affairs, except where specifically limited by national laws. Such limitations, however, could weigh heavily on Indian tribes. The Navajos, the nation’s largest tribe, refused to cooperate with the Reorganization Act as a protest against a federal soil conservation program that required them to reduce their herds of livestock. The New Deal marked the most radical shift in Indian policy in the nation’s history. But living conditions on the desperately poor reservations did not significantly improve, and New Deal programs often ignored Indians’ interests. The building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River flooded thousands of acres where Indians had hunted and fished for centuries. But the government did not make any of the irrigation water available to the region’s reservations. The New Deal and Mexican-Americans For Mexican-Americans, the Depression was a wrenching experience. With demand for their labor plummeting, more than 400,000 (one-fifth of the population of Mexican origin) returned to Mexico, some voluntarily, others at the 848 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did New Deal benefits apply to women and minorities? strong urging of local authorities in the Southwest. A majority of those “encouraged” to leave the country were recent immigrants, but they included perhaps 200,000 Mexican-American children who had been born in the United States and were therefore citizens. Those who remained mostly worked in grim conditions in California’s vegetable and fruit fields, whose corporate farms benefited enormously from New Deal dam construction that provided them with cheap electricity and water for irrigation. The Wagner and Social Secu- The Farm Security Administration hired noted rity Acts did not apply to agricultural photographers to document American life. This laborers. When the workers tried to image by Dorothea Lange, from 1938, shows Hispanic women packing apricots in Brentwood, organize a union as part of the decade’s California. labor upsurge, they were brutally suppressed. In his 1939 book Factories in the Field, the writer Carey McWilliams exposed the low wages, inadequate housing, and political repression under which the migrant laborers suffered, which the New Deal did nothing to alleviate. Mexican-American leaders struggled to develop a consistent strategy for their people. They sought greater rights by claiming to be white Americans— in order to not suffer the same discrimination as African-Americans—but also sought the backing of the Mexican government and promoted a mystical sense of pride and identification with Mexican heritage later given the name la raza. Last Hired, First Fired As the “last hired and first fired,” African-Americans were hit hardest by the Depression. Even those who retained their jobs now faced competition from unemployed whites who had previously considered positions like waiter and porter beneath them. With an unemployment rate double that of whites, blacks benefited disproportionately from direct government relief and, especially in northern cities, jobs on New Deal public-works projects. Half of the families in Harlem received public assistance during the 1930s. The Depression propelled economic survival to the top of the black agenda. Demonstrations in Harlem demanded jobs in the neighborhood’s white-owned stores, with the slogan “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” W. E. B. Du Bois The L imits of C hange ★ 849 a bandoned his earlier goal of racial integration as unrealistic for the foreseeable future. Blacks, he wrote, must recognize themselves as “a nation within a nation.” He called on blacks to organize for economic survival by building an independent, cooperative economy within their segregated communities, and to gain control of their own separate schools (a position reminiscent of that of Booker T. Washington, whom he had earlier condemned). A New Deal for Blacks Although Roosevelt seems to have had little personal interest in race relations or civil rights, he appointed Mary McLeod Bethune, a prominent black educator, as a special adviser on minority affairs and a number of other blacks to important federal positions. Key members of his administration, including his wife, Eleanor, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a former president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, directed national attention to the injustices of segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching. In 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to allow the black singer Marian Anderson to present a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington. The president’s wife arranged for Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and for the concert to be broadcast nationally on the radio. Thanks to the New Deal, the decade witnessed a historic shift in black voting patterns. In the North and West, where they enjoyed the right to vote, blacks in 1934 and 1936 abandoned their allegiance to the party of Lincoln and emancipation in favor of Democrats and the New Deal. But their hopes for broad changes in the nation’s race system were disappointed. Despite a massive lobbying campaign, southern congressmen prevented passage of a federal antilynching law. FDR offered little support. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told Walter White of the NAACP; he could not jeopardize his economic programs by alienating powerful members of Congress. The CCC established segregated work camps. Because of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers, Social Security’s old age pensions and unemployment benefits and the minimum wages established by the Fair Labor Standards Act left uncovered 60 percent of all employed blacks and 85 percent of black women. Federal Discrimination Federal housing policy, which powerfully reinforced residential segregation, revealed the limits of New Deal freedom. As in the case of Social Security, local officials put national housing policy into practice in a way that reinforced 850 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did New Deal benefits apply to women and minorities? existing racial boundaries. Nearly all municipalities, North as well as South, insisted that housing built or financially aided by the federal government be racially segregated. (In Texas, some communities financed three sets of housing projects—for whites, blacks, and Mexicans.) The Federal Housing Administration, moreover, had no hesitation about insuring mortgages that contained clauses barring future sales During the 1930s, the South remained rigidly to non-white buyers, and it refused to segregated. This 1939 photograph by Dorthea channel money into integrated neigh- Lange depicts a “colored” movie theater in the borhoods. In some cases, the presence Mississippi Delta. of a single black family led the agency to declare an entire block off-limits for federal mortgage insurance. Along with discriminatory practices by private banks and real-estate companies, federal policy became a major factor in further entrenching housing segregation in the United States. Federal employment practices also discriminated on the basis of race. As late as 1940, of the 150,000 blacks holding federal jobs, only 2 percent occupied positions other than clerk or custodian. In the South, many New Deal construction projects refused to hire blacks at all. “They give all the work to white people and give us nothing,” a black resident of Mississippi wrote to FDR in 1935. The New Deal began the process of modernizing southern agriculture, but tenants, black and white, footed much of the bill. Tens of thousands of sharecroppers, as noted earlier, were driven off the land as a result of the AAA policy of raising crop prices by paying landowners to reduce cotton acreage. Support for civil rights would eventually become a test of liberal credentials. But in the 1930s, one could advocate Roosevelt’s economic program and oppose antilynching legislation and moves to incorporate black workers within Social Security. Theodore Bilbo, the notoriously racist senator from Mississippi, was one of the New Deal’s most loyal backers. Not until the Great Society of the 1960s would those left out of Social Security and other New Deal programs—racial minorities, many women, migrants and other less privileged workers—win inclusion in the American welfare state. Nonetheless, in a society in which virtually all institutions, public and private, created and reinforced patterns of discrimination, the New Deal helped to create an atmosphere that made possible challenges to the racial and ethnic status quo and the rise of a new, more inclusive vision of American freedom. The L imits of C hange ★ 851 A NEW CONCEPTION OF AMERICA If the New Deal failed to dismantle the barriers that barred non-whites from full participation in American life, the 1930s witnessed the absorption of other groups into the social mainstream. With Catholics and Jews occupying prominent posts in the Roosevelt administration and new immigrant voters forming an important part of its electoral support, the New Deal made ethnic pluralism a living reality in American politics. One of Roosevelt’s first acts on taking office had been to sign the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, an anticipation of the constitutional amendment repealing prohibition. While promoted as a way to revive employment in the liquor industry and boost tax revenues, it also represented a repudiation of the linkage of politics and Protestant morality. The election of the Italian-American Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York City in 1933 symbolized the coming to power of the new immigrants. Although a Republican, La Guardia worked closely with FDR and launched his own program of spending on housing, parks, and public works. La Guardia’s was one of numerous “little New Deals” that brought ethnic working-class voters to power in communities throughout the industrial heartland. Thanks to the virtual cutoff of southern and eastern European immigration in 1924, the increasing penetration of movies, chain stores, and mass advertising into ethnic communities, and the common experience of economic crisis, the 1930s witnessed an acceleration of cultural assimilation. But the process had a different content from the corporate-sponsored Americanization plans of the preceding years. For the children of the new immigrants, labor and political activism became agents of a new kind of Americanization. One could participate fully in the broader society without surrendering one’s ideals and ethnic identity. “Unionism is Americanism” became a CIO rallying cry. “The Mesabi Range,” a Minnesota miner wrote to Secretary of Labor Perkins, complaining of low wages and management hostility to unions in the iron-rich region, “isn’t Americanized yet.” The Heyday of American Communism In the mid-1930s, for the first time in American history, the left—an umbrella term for socialists, communists, labor radicals, and many New Deal liberals— enjoyed a shaping influence on the nation’s politics and culture. The CIO and Communist Party became focal points for a broad social and intellectual impulse that helped to redraw the boundaries of American freedom. An obscure, faction-ridden organization when the Depression began, the Communist Party experienced remarkable growth during the 1930s. The party’s membership never exceeded 100,000, but several times that number passed through its ranks. 852 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did the Popular Front influence American culture in the 1930s? The party’s commitment to socialism resonated with a widespread belief that the Depression had demonstrated the bankruptcy of capitalism. But it was not so much the party’s ideology as its vitality—its involvement in a mind-boggling array of activities, including demonstrations of the unemployed, struggles for industrial unionism, and a renewed movement for black civil rights—that for a time made it the center of gravity for a broad democratic upsurge. At the height of the Popular Front—a period during the mid-1930s when the Communist Party sought to ally itself with socialists and New Dealers in movements for social change, urging reform of the capitalist system rather than revolution—Communists gained an unprecedented respectability. Earl Browder, the party’s leader, even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. It is one of the era’s ironies that an organization with an undemocratic structure and closely tied to Stalin’s dictatorial regime in Russia should have contributed to the expansion of freedom in the United States. But the Communist Party helped to imbue New Deal liberalism with a militant spirit and a more pluralistic understanding of Americanism. Redefining the People In theater, film, and dance, the Popular Front vision of American society sank deep roots and survived much longer than the political moment from which it sprang. In this broad left-wing culture, social and economic radicalism, not support for the status quo, defined true Americanism, ethnic and racial diversity was the glory of American society, and the “American way of life” meant unionism and social citizenship, not the unbridled pursuit of wealth. The American “people,” viewed by many intellectuals in the 1920s as representing mean- spirited fundamentalism and crass commercialism, were suddenly rediscovered as embodiments of democratic virtue. The “common man,” Roosevelt proclaimed, embodied “the heart and soul of our country.” During the 1930s, artists and writers who strove to create socially meaningful works eagerly took up the task of depicting the daily lives of ordinary farmers and city dwellers. Art about the people—such as Dorothea Lange’s photographs of migrant workers and sharecroppers—and art created by the people—such as black spirituals—came to be seen as expressions of genuine Americanism. The Federal Music Project dispatched collectors with tape recorders to help preserve American folk music. Films celebrated populist figures who challenged and defeated corrupt businessmen and politicians, as in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). New immigrants, especially Jews and Italians, played a prominent role in producing and directing Hollywood films of the 1930s. Their movies, however, glorified not urban ethnic communities but ordinary small-town middle-class Americans. A N ew Conception of A merica ★ 853 Promoting Diversity “A new conception of America is necessary,” wrote the immigrant labor radical Louis Adamic in 1938. Despite bringing ethnic and northern black voters into its political coalition, the Democratic Party said little about ethno-cultural issues, fearful of rekindling the divisive battles of the 1920s. But the Popular Front forthrightly sought to promote the idea that the country’s strength lay in diversity, tolerance, and the rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege. The CIO avidly promoted the idea of ethnic and racial inclusiveness. It broke decisively with the AFL’s tradition of exclusionary unionism. “We are the only Americans who take them into our organization as equals,” wrote labor organizer Rose Pesotta, referring to the Mexican-Americans who flocked to the Cannery and Agricultural Workers union. Popular Front culture presented a heroic but not uncritical picture of the country’s past. Martha Graham’s modern dance masterpiece American Document (1938), an embodiment of Popular Front aesthetics with its emphasis on America’s folk traditions and multi-ethnic heritage, centered its account of history on the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Yet Graham did not neglect what her narrator called “things we are ashamed of,” including the dispossession of the Indians and the plight of the unemployed. Graham’s answer to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s old question, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” was that Americans were not only m iddle-class Anglo-Saxons but also blacks, immigrants, and the working class. Earl Robinson’s song “Ballad for Americans,” a typical expression of Popular Front culture that celebrated the religious, racial, and ethnic diversity of American society, became a national hit and was performed in 1940 at the Republican national convention. Challenging the Color Line It was fitting that “Ballad for Americans” reached the top of the charts in a version performed by the magnificent black singer Paul Robeson. Popular Front culture moved well beyond New Deal liberalism in condemning racism as incompatible with true Americanism. In the 1930s, groups like the American Jewish Committee and the National Conference of Christians and Jews actively promoted ethnic and religious tolerance, defining pluralism as “the American way.” But whether in Harlem or East Los Angeles, the Communist Party was the era’s only predominantly white organization to make fighting racism a top priority. “The communists,” declared Charles H. Houston, the NAACP’s chief lawyer, “made it impossible for any aspirant to Negro leadership to advocate less than full economic, political and social equality.” Communist influence spread even to the South. The Communist- dominated International Labor Defense mobilized popular support for black 854 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did the Popular Front influence American culture in the 1930s? defendants victimized by a racist criminal justice system. It helped to make the Scottsboro case an international cause célèbre. The case revolved around nine young black men arrested for the rape of two white women in Alabama in 1931. Despite the weakness of the evidence against the “Scottsboro boys” and the fact that one of the two accusers recanted, Alabama authorities three times put them on trial and three times won convictions. Landmark Supreme Court decisions overturned the first two verdicts and established legal principles that greatly expanded the definition of civil liberties—that defendants have a constitutional right to effective legal representation, and that states cannot systematically exclude blacks from juries. But the Court allowed the third set of convictions to stand, which led to prison sentences for five of the defendants. In 1937, a defense lawyer worked out a deal whereby Alabama authorities released nearly all the defendants on parole, although the last of the “Scottsboro boys” did not leave prison until thirteen years had passed. Despite considerable resistance from white workers determined to preserve their monopoly of skilled positions and access to promotions, the CIO welcomed black members and advocated the passage of antilynching laws and the return of voting rights to southern blacks. The CIO brought large numbers of black industrial workers into the labor movement for the first time and ran extensive educational campaigns to persuade white workers to recognize the interests they shared with their black counterparts. Black workers, many of them traditionally hostile to unions because of their long experience of exclusion, responded with enthusiasm to CIO organizing efforts. The union offered the promise of higher wages, dignity in the workplace, and an end to the arbitrary power of often racist foremen. Ed McRea, a white CIO organizer in Memphis, Tennessee, reported that he had little difficulty persuading black workers of the value of unionization: “You didn’t have any trouble explaining this to blacks, with the kinds of oppression and conditions they had. It was a question of freedom.” Labor and Civil Liberties Another central element of Popular Front public culture was its mobilization for civil liberties, especially the right of labor to organize. The struggle to launch industrial unions encountered sweeping local restrictions on freedom of speech as well as repression by private and public police forces. Nationwide publicity about the wave of violence directed against the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in the South and the CIO in industrial communities in the North elevated the rights of labor to a central place in discussions of civil liberties. The American Civil Liberties Union, primarily concerned in the A N ew Conception of A merica ★ 855 1920s with governmental repression, by 1934 concluded that “the masters of property” posed as great a danger to freedom of speech and assembly as political authorities. Beginning in 1936, a Senate subcommittee headed by Robert M. La Follette Jr. exposed the methods employers used to combat unionization, including spies and private police forces. Workers had “no liberties at all,” an employee of General Motors wrote to the committee from Saginaw, Michigan. The extensive violence unleashed against strikers in California’s cotton and lettuce fields made that state, the committee report concluded, seem more like a “European dictatorship” than part of the United States. Labor militancy helped to produce an important shift in the understanding of civil liberties. Previously conceived of as individual rights that must be protected against infringement by the government, the concept now expanded to include violations of free speech and assembly by powerful private groups. As a result, just as the federal government emerged as a guarantor of economic security, it also became a protector of freedom of expression. By the eve of World War II, civil liberties had assumed a central place in the New Deal understanding of freedom. In 1939, Attorney General Frank Murphy established a Civil Liberties Unit in the Department of Justice. “For the first time in our history,” Murphy wrote the president, “the full weight of the Department will be thrown behind the effort to preserve in this country the blessings of liberty.” Meanwhile, the same Supreme Court that in 1937 relinquished its role as a judge of economic legislation moved to expand its authority over civil liberties. The justices insisted that constitutional guarantees of free thought and expression were essential to “nearly every other form of freedom” and therefore deserved special protection by the courts. Thus, civil liberties replaced liberty of contract as the judicial foundation of freedom. In 1937, the Court overturned on free speech grounds the conviction of Angelo Herndon, a Communist organizer jailed in Georgia for “inciting insurrection.” Three years later, it invalidated an Alabama law that prohibited picketing in labor disputes. Since 1937, the large majority of state and national laws overturned by the courts have been those that infringe on civil liberties, not on the property rights of business. The new appreciation of free expression was hardly universal. In 1938, the House of Representatives established the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate disloyalty. Its expansive definition of “un-American” included communists, labor radicals, and the left of the Democratic Party, and its hearings led to the dismissal of dozens of federal employees on charges of subversion. Two years later, Congress enacted the Smith Act, which made it a federal crime to “teach, advocate, or encourage” the overthrow of the government. A similar pursuit of radical views took place at the state level. The New 856 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did the Popular Front influence American culture in the 1930s? Isaac Soyer’s painting of dispirited men and women at an employment agency in 1937 illustrates that despite its many accomplishments, the New Deal failed to solve the problem of mass joblessness. York legislature’s Rapp-Coudert Committee held sweeping hearings investigating “subversive” influences in New York City’s public colleges, resulting in the firing in 1941 of some sixty faculty members charged with communist sympathies. The End of the New Deal By then the New Deal, as an era of far-reaching social reform, had already begun to recede. One reason was that more and more southern Democrats were finding themselves at odds with Roosevelt’s policies. In 1938, the administration released a “Report on Economic Conditions in the South,” along with a letter by the president referring to the region as “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” The document revealed that the South lagged far behind other parts of the country in industrialization and investment in education and public A N ew Conception of A merica ★ 857 health. Its per capita income stood at half that of the rest of the nation. Also in 1938, a new generation of homegrown radicals—southern New Dealers, black activists, labor leaders, communists, even a few elected officials—founded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare to work for unionization, unemployment relief, and racial justice. Until the late 1930s, prominent southern Democrats had been strong supporters of the New Deal, while at the same time working to shape legislation to allow for the local administration of relief and the exclusion of most black workers. Now, southern business and political leaders feared that continuing federal intervention in their region would encourage unionization and upset race relations. Roosevelt concluded that the enactment of future New Deal measures required a liberalization of the southern Democratic Party. In 1938, he tried to persuade the region’s voters to replace conservative congressmen with ones who would support his policies. The South’s small electorate dealt him a stinging rebuke. In the North, where the economic downturn, the “Court-packing” plan, and the upsurge of CIO militancy alarmed many middle-class voters, Republicans increased their congressional representation. A period of political stalemate followed the congressional election of 1938. For many years, a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans dominated Congress. Further reform initiatives became almost impossible, and Congress moved to abolish existing ones, beginning with the Federal Theater Project, which had alarmed conservatives because of the presence of radicals and homosexuals on its payroll. Congress repealed an earlier tax on corporate profits and rejected a proposed program of national medical insurance. The administration, moreover, increasingly focused its attention on the storm gathering in Europe. Even before December 1941, when the United States entered World War II, “Dr. Win the War,” as Roosevelt put it, had replaced “Dr. New Deal.” The New Deal in American History Given the scope of the economic calamity it tried to counter, the New Deal seems in many ways quite limited. Compared to later European welfare states, Social Security remained restricted in scope and modest in cost. The New Deal failed to address the problem of racial inequality, which in some ways it actually worsened. Yet even as the New Deal receded, its substantial accomplishments remained. It greatly expanded the federal government’s role in the American economy and made it an independent force in relations between industry and labor. The government influenced what farmers could and could not plant, 858 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal How did the Popular Front influence American culture in the 1930s? required employers to deal with unions, insured bank deposits, regulated the stock market, loaned money to home owners, and provided payments to a majority of the elderly and unemployed. It transformed the physical environment through hydroelectric dams, reforestation projects, rural electrification, and the construction of innumerable public facilities. It restored faith in democracy and made the government an institution directly experienced in Americans’ daily lives and directly concerned with their welfare. It redrew the map of American politics. It helped to inspire, and was powerfully influenced by, a popular upsurge that recast the idea of freedom to include a public guarantee of economic security for ordinary citizens and that identified economic inequality as the greatest threat to American freedom. The New Deal certainly improved economic conditions in the United States. But it did not generate sustained prosperity. More than 15 percent of the workforce remained unemployed in 1940. Only the mobilization of the nation’s resources to fight World War II would finally end the Great Depression. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. D iscuss how regional planning such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Columbia River project reflected broader changes in American life during the New Deal. 2. W hat actions did President Roosevelt and Congress take to help the banking system recover as well as to reform how it operated in the long run? 3. H ow did the actions of the AAA benefit many farmers, injure others, and provoke attacks by conservatives? 4. E xplain what labor did in the 1930s to rise from being “slaves of the depression” to secure “economic freedom and industrial democracy” for American workers. 5. H ow did the emphasis of the Second New Deal differ from the First New Deal? 6. H ow did the entrenched power of southern white conservatives limit African-Americans’ ability to enjoy the full benefits of the New Deal and eliminate racial violence and discrimination? Why did African-Americans still support the Democratic Party? 7. A nalyze the effects of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 on Native Americans. 8. E xplain how New Deal programs contributed to the stigma of blacks as welfare-dependent. 9. H ow did the New Deal build on traditional ideas about the importance of home ownership to Americans, and how did it change Americans’ ability to own their own homes? 10. What were the major characteristics of liberalism by 1939? C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 859 KEY TERMS New Deal (p. 821) sit-down strike (p. 832) Emergency Banking Act (p. 824) Hundred Days (p. 824) Share Our Wealth movement (p. 834) National Industrial Recovery Act (p. 824) Works Progress Administration (p. 836) National Recovery Administration (p. 824) Wagner Act (p. 837) Civilian Conservation Corps (p. 825) welfare state (p. 837) Public Works Administration (p. 826) Court packing (p. 841) Tennessee Valley Authority (p. 826) Indian New Deal (p. 848) Agricultural Adjustment Act (p. 826) Popular Front (p. 853) Dust Bowl (p. 827) Scottsboro case (p. 855) Federal Housing Administration (p. 829) House Un-American Activities Committee (p. 856) Social Security Act (p. 837) Congress of Industrial Organizations (p. 831) Go to Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. 860 ★ CHAPTER 21 The N ew Deal What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 22 ★ FIGHTING FOR THE FOUR FREEDOMS: WORLD WAR II 1941–1945 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What steps led to American participation in World War II? • How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? • What visions of America’s postwar role began to emerge during the war? • How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? • How did the end of the war begin to shape the postwar world? B y far the most popular works of art produced during World War II were paintings of the Four Freedoms by the magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell. In his State of the Union Address, delivered before Congress on January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt spoke eloquently of a future world order founded on the “essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The Four Freedoms became Roosevelt’s favorite statement of Allied aims. At various times, he compared them with the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, and the ★ 861 Emancipation Proclamation. They embodied, Roosevelt declared in a 1942 radio address, the “rights of men of every creed and every race, wherever they live,” and made clear “the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today.” Rockwell’s paintings succeeded in linking the Four Freedoms with the defense of traditional American values. “Words like freedom or liberty,” declared one wartime advertisement, “draw close to us only when we break them down into the homely fragments of daily life.” This insight helps to explain Rockwell’s astonishing popularity. Born in New York City in 1894, Rockwell had lived in the New York area until 1939, when he and his family moved to Arlington, Vermont, where they could enjoy, as he put it, “the clean, simple country life, as opposed to the complicated world of the city.” Drawing on the lives of his Vermont neighbors, Rockwell translated the Four Freedoms into images of real people situated in small-town America. Each of the paintings focuses on an instantly recognizable situation. An ordinary citizen rises to speak at a town meeting; members of different religious groups are seen at prayer; a family enjoys a Thanksgiving dinner; a mother and father stand over a sleeping child. The Four Freedoms paintings first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post early in 1943. Letters of praise poured in to the magazine’s editors. The government produced and sold millions of reprints. The paintings toured the country as the centerpiece of the Four Freedoms Show, which included theatrical presentations, parades, and other events aimed at persuading Americans to purchase war bonds. By the end of its tour, the Four Freedoms Show had raised $133 million. Even as Rockwell invoked images of small-town life to rally Americans to the war effort, however, the country experienced changes as deep as at any time in its history. Many of the economic trends and social movements that we associate with the last half of the twentieth century had their roots in the war years. As during World War I, but on a far larger scale, wartime mobilization expanded the size and scope of government and energized the economy. The gross national product more than doubled and unemployment disappeared as war production finally conquered the Depression. The demand for labor drew millions of women into the workforce and sent a tide of migrants from rural America to the industrial cities of the North and West, permanently altering the nation’s social geography. Some 30 million Americans moved during the war, half going into military service and half taking up new jobs. World War II gave the country a new and lasting international role and greatly strengthened the idea that American security was global in scope and could only be protected by the worldwide triumph of core American values. 862 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I Government military spending sparked the economic development of the South and West, laying the foundation for the rise of the modern Sunbelt. The war created a close link between big business and a militarized federal government—a “military- industrial complex,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later call it—that long survived the end of fighting. World War II also redrew the boundaries of American nationality. In contrast to World War I, the government recognized the “new immigrants” of the early twentieth century and their children as loyal Americans. Black Americans’ second-class status assumed, for the first time since Reconstruction, a prominent place on the nation’s political agenda. But toleration had its limits. With the United States at war with Japan, the federal government removed more than 110,000 Japanese- Americans, the majority of them American citizens, from their homes and placed them in internment camps. As a means of generating support for the struggle, the Four Freedoms provided a crucial language of national unity. But this unity obscured divisions within American society that the war in some ways intensified, divisions reflected in debates over freedom. While some Americans looked forward to a worldwide New Deal, others envisioned “free enterprise” replacing government intervention in the economy. The war gave birth to the modern civil rights movement but strengthened the commitment of many white Americans to maintain the existing racial order. The movement of women into the labor force challenged traditional gender relations, but most men and not a few women longed for the restoration of family life with a male breadwinner and a wife responsible for the home. • CHRONOLOGY • 1931 Japan invades Manchuria 1933 U.S. recognizes Soviet Union 1935– 1939 Congress passes Neutrality Acts 1937 Sino-Japanese War begins 1938 Munich agreement 1939 Germany invades Poland 1940 Draft established 1941 Four Freedoms speech Henry Luce’s The American Century Lend-Lease Act Executive Order 8802 Atlantic Charter Pearl Harbor attacked 1942 Executive Order 9066 Battle of Midway Island Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) formed 1943 Zoot suit riots Detroit race riot Congress lifts Chinese Exclusion Act 1944 Smith v. Allwright D-Day GI Bill of Rights Bretton Woods conference Korematsu v. United States Battle of the Bulge 1945 Yalta conference Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes president V-E Day (May) Atomic bombs dropped on Japan End of war in Pacific • FIGHT I N G FO R TH E FO UR FREEDO MS : W O R L D WA R I I ★ 863 • Even Rockwell’s popular paintings suggested some of the ambiguities within the idea of freedom. With the exception of Freedom of Speech, which depicts civic democracy in action, the paintings emphasized private situations. The message seemed to be that Americans were fighting to preserve freedoms enjoyed individually or within the family rather than in the larger public world. This emphasis on freedom as an element of private life would become more and more prominent in postwar America. FIGHTING WORLD WAR II The immensely popular Office of War Information poster reproducing Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the Four Freedoms, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s shorthand for American purposes in World War II. Good Neighbors During the 1930s, with Americans preoccupied by the economic crisis, international relations played only a minor role in public affairs. From the outset of his administration, nonetheless, FDR embarked on a number of departures in foreign policy. In 1933, hoping to stimulate American trade, he exchanged ambassadors with the Soviet Union, whose government his Republican predecessors had stubbornly refused to recognize. Roosevelt also formalized a policy initiated by Herbert Hoover by which the United States repudiated the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of Latin American countries. This Good Neighbor Policy, as it was called, had mixed results. During the 1930s, the United States withdrew its troops from Haiti and Nicaragua. FDR accepted Cuba’s repeal of the Platt Amendment (discussed in Chapter 17), which had authorized American military interventions on that island. These steps offered a belated recognition of the sovereignty of America’s neighbors. But while Roosevelt condemned “economic royalists” (wealthy businessmen) at home, like previous presidents he felt comfortable dealing with undemocratic governments friendly to American business interests abroad. The United States lent its support to dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic, and 864 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What steps led to American participation in World War II? Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” FDR said of Somoza. However, as the international crisis deepened in the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took steps to counter German influence in Latin America by expanding hemispheric trade and promoting respect for American culture. Nelson Rockefeller, the head of an office that hoped to expand cultural relations in the hemisphere, sent the artists of the American Ballet Caravan and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on Latin American tours. This was a far different approach to relations with Central and South America than the military interventions of the first decades of the century. The Road to War Ominous developments in Asia and Europe quickly overshadowed events in Latin America. By the mid-1930s, it seemed clear that the rule of law was disintegrating in international relations and that war was on the horizon. In 1931, seeking to expand its military and economic power in Asia, Japan invaded Manchuria, a province of northern China. Six years later, its troops moved farther into China. When the Japanese overran the city of Nanjing, they massacred an estimated 300,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians. An aggressive power threatened Europe as well. After brutally consolidating his rule in Germany, Adolf Hitler embarked on a campaign to control the entire continent. In violation of the Versailles Treaty, he feverishly pursued German rearmament. In 1936, he sent troops to occupy the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone between France and Germany established after World War I. The failure of Britain, France, and the United States to oppose this action convinced Hitler that the democracies could not muster the will to halt his aggressive plans. Italian leader Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, a movement similar to Hitler’s Nazism, invaded and conquered Ethiopia. When General Francisco Franco in 1936 led an uprising against the democratically elected government of Spain, Hitler poured in arms, seeing the conflict as a testing ground for new weaponry. In 1939, Franco emerged victorious from a bitter civil war, establishing yet another fascist government in Europe. As part of a campaign to unite all Europeans of German origin in a single empire, Hitler in 1938 annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter, he gobbled up all of that country. As the 1930s progressed, Roosevelt became more and more alarmed at Hitler’s aggression as well as his accelerating campaign against Germany’s Jews, whom the Nazis stripped of citizenship and property and began to deport to concentration camps. In a 1937 speech in Chicago, FDR called for international action to “quarantine” aggressors. But no further steps followed. Roosevelt had Fighting W orld War I I ★ 865 little choice but to follow the policy of “appeasement” adopted by Britain and France, who hoped that agreeing to Hitler’s demands would prevent war. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich conference of 1938, which awarded Hitler the Sudetenland, proclaiming that he had guaranteed “peace in our time.” Isolationism To most Americans, the threat arising from Japanese and German aggression seemed very distant. Moreover, Hitler had more than a few admirers in the United States. Obsessed with the threat of communism, some Americans approved of his expansion of German power as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Businessmen did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets. Henry Ford did business with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. Indeed, Ford plants there employed slave labor provided by the German government. Trade with Japan also continued, including shipments of American trucks and aircraft and considerable amounts of oil. Until 1941, 80 percent of Japan’s oil supply came from the United States. Many Americans remained convinced that involvement in World War I had been a mistake. Senate hearings in 1934–1935 headed by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota revealed that international bankers and arms exporters had pressed the Wilson administration to enter that war and had profited handsomely from it. Pacifism spread on college campuses, where tens of thousands of students took part in a “strike for peace” in 1935. Ethnic allegiances reinforced Americans’ traditional reluctance to enter foreign conflicts. Many Americans of German and Italian descent celebrated the expansion of national power in their countries of origin, even when they disdained their dictatorial governments. Irish-Americans remained strongly anti-British. Isolationism—the 1930s version of Americans’ long-standing desire to avoid foreign entanglements—dominated Congress. Beginning in 1935, lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belligerents’ ships and the sale of arms to countries at war. These policies, Congress hoped, would allow the United States to avoid the conflicts over freedom of the seas that had contributed to involvement in World War I. Despite the fact that the Spanish Civil War pitted a democratic government against an aspiring fascist d ictator, the Western democracies, including the United States, imposed an embargo on arms shipments to both sides. Some 3,000 Americans volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the side of the Spanish republic. But with Germany supplying the forces of Franco, the decision by democratic countries to abide by the arms embargo contributed substantially to his victory. 866 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What steps led to American participation in World War II? War in Europe In the Munich agreement of 1938, Britain and France had caved in to Hitler’s aggression. In 1939, the Soviet Union proposed an international agreement to oppose further German demands for territory. Britain and France, who distrusted Stalin and saw Germany as a bulwark against the spread of communist influence in Europe, refused. Stalin then astonished the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler, his former sworn enemy. On September 1, immediately after the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact, Germany invaded Poland. This time, Britain and France, who had pledged to protect Poland against aggression, declared war. But Germany appeared unstoppable. Within a year, the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) had overrun Poland and much of Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. On June 14, 1940, German troops occupied Paris. Hitler now dominated nearly all of Europe, as well as North Africa. In September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan created a military alliance known as the Axis. For one critical year, Britain stood virtually alone in fighting Germany. Winston Churchill, who became prime minister in 1940, vowed to resist a threatened Nazi invasion. In the Battle of Britain of 1940–1941, German planes launched devastating attacks on London and other cities. The Royal Air Force eventually turned back the air assault. But Churchill pointedly called on the “new world, with all its power and might,” to step forward to rescue the old. Toward Intervention Roosevelt viewed Hitler as a mad gangster whose victories posed a direct threat to the United States. But most Americans remained desperate to remain out of the conflict. “What worries me, especially,” FDR wrote to Kansas editor William Allen White, “is that public opinion over here is patting itself on the back every morning and thanking God for the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.” After a tumultuous debate, Congress in 1940 agreed to allow the sale of arms to Britain on a “cash and carry” basis—that is, they had to be paid for in cash and transported in British ships. It also approved plans for military rearmament. But with a presidential election looming, Roosevelt was reluctant to go further. Opponents of involvement in Europe organized the America First Committee, with hundreds of thousands of members and a leadership that included such well-known figures as Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles A. Lindbergh. In 1940, breaking with a tradition that dated back to George Washington, Roosevelt announced his candidacy for a third term as president. The international situation was too dangerous and domestic recovery too fragile, he insisted, for him to leave office. Republicans chose as his opponent a political amateur, Wall Street businessman and lawyer Wendell Willkie. Differences between the candidates were far more muted than in 1936. Both supported the Fighting W orld War I I ★ 867 law, enacted in September 1940, that established the nation’s first peacetime draft. Willkie endorsed New Deal social legislation. He captured more votes than Roosevelt’s previous opponents, but FDR still emerged with a decisive victory. Soon after his victory, in a fireside chat in December 1940, Roosevelt announced that the United States would become the “great arsenal of democracy,” providing Britain and China with military supplies in their fight against Germany and Japan. During 1941, the United States became more and more closely allied with those fighting Germany and Japan. But with Britain virtually bankrupt, it could no longer pay for supplies. At Roosevelt’s urging, Congress passed the LendLease Act, which authorized military aid so long as countries promised somehow to return it all after the war. Under the law’s provisions, the United States funneled billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Britain and China, as well as the Soviet Union, after Hitler renounced his nonaggression pact and invaded that country in June 1941. FDR also froze Japanese assets in the United States, halting virtually all trade between the countries, including the sale of oil vital to Japan. Those who believed that the United States must intervene to stem the rising tide of fascism tried to awaken a reluctant country to prepare for war. Interventionists popularized slogans that would become central to wartime mobilization. In June 1941, refugees from Germany and the occupied countries of Europe joined with Americans to form the Free World Association, which sought to bring the United States into the war against Hitler. The same year saw the formation of Freedom House. With a prestigious membership that included university presidents, ministers, businessmen, and labor leaders, Freedom House described the war raging in Europe as an ideological struggle between dictatorship and the “free world.” In October 1941, it sponsored a “Fight for Freedom” rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, complete with a patriotic variety show entitled “It’s Fun to Be Free.” The rally ended by demanding an immediate declaration of war against Germany. Pearl Harbor Until November 1941, the administration’s attention focused on Europe. But at the end of that month, intercepted Japanese messages revealed that an assault in the Pacific was imminent. No one, however, knew where it would come. On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the first attack by a foreign power on American soil since the War of 1812. Japan launched the attack in the hope of crippling American naval power in the Pacific. With a free hand in its campaign of conquest in East Asia, Japan would gain access to supplies of oil 868 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What steps led to American participation in World War II? and other resources it could no longer obtain from the United States. It hoped that destroying the American fleet would establish Japan for years to come as the dominant power in the region. Pearl Harbor was a complete and devastating surprise. In a few hours, more than 2,000 American servicemen were killed, and 187 aircraft and 18 naval vessels, including 8 battleships, destroyed or damaged. By a stroke of fortune, no aircraft carriers—which would prove decisive in the Pacific war—happened to be docked at Pearl Harbor on December 7. To this day, conspiracy theories abound suggesting that FDR knew of the attack and did nothing to prevent it so as to bring the United States into the war. No credible evidence supports this charge. Indeed, with the country drawing ever closer to intervention in Europe, Roosevelt hoped to keep the peace in the Pacific. But Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who saw the president after the attack, remarked that he seemed calm—“his terrible moral problem had been resolved.” Terming December 7 “a date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. The combined vote in Congress was 388 in favor and 1 against—pacifist Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who had also voted against American entry into World War I. The next day, Germany declared war on the United States. America had finally joined the largest war in human history. The War in the Pacific World War II has been called a “gross national product war,” meaning that its outcome turned on which coalition of combatants could outproduce the other. In retrospect, it appears inevitable that the entry of the United States, with its superior industrial might, would ensure the defeat of the Axis powers. But the first few months of American involvement witnessed an unbroken string of military disasters. Having earlier occupied substantial portions of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), Japan in early 1942 conquered Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand). Japan also took control of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), whose extensive oil fields could replace supplies from the United States. And it occupied Guam, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands. At Bataan, in the Philippines, the Japanese forced 78,000 American and Filipino troops to lay down their arms—the largest surrender in American military history. Thousands perished on the ensuing “death march” to a prisoner-of-war camp, and thousands more died of disease and starvation after they arrived. At the same time, German submarines sank hundreds of Allied merchant and naval vessels during the Battle of the Atlantic. Soon, however, the tide of battle began to turn. In May 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the American navy turned back a Japanese fleet intent on attacking Australia. The following month, it inflicted devastating losses on Fighting W orld War I I ★ 869 W O R L D WA R I I I N T H E PA C I F I C , 1 9 4 1 – 1 9 4 5 SOVIET UNION Sa k h a li n Isla nd At t u JAPAN KOREA CHINA Nanking Shanghai Chungking Canton BURMA Hong Kong FRENCH Manila SIAM Bangkok INDOCHINA Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 M a r i a na Isla nd s PHILIPPINES Leyte Gulf October 23–26, 1944 H a wa i i a n I s l a n d s ( U. S . ) Marshall Isl a n d s Guam July 21, 1944 Ca ro li ne Isla nd s Singapore Su m Bor n eo at ra J ava Midway June 3–6, 1942 Fo r m o sa MALAYA DUTCH EAST INDIES New G ui ne a Port Moresby Indian Ocean 750 ) Tokyo Hiroshima August 6, 1945 Nagasaki August 9, 1945 Saigon 0 .S. Pa c i f i c Ocean Peking 750 (U Kur i l Isla nd s Vladivostock 0 nds MANCHURIA MONGOLIA Rangoon K i s ka la n Is Aleutia 1,500 miles 1,500 kilometers Gilbert Islands So lo m ao n Isla nd s Guadalcanal August 1942–February 1943 Coral Sea May 7–8, 1942 AUSTRALIA Coral Sea Major battle Atomic bomb Extent of Japanese control Allied forces Although the Japanese navy never fully recovered from its defeats at the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, it took three more years for American forces to near the Japanese homeland. the Japanese navy in the Battle of Midway Island. American codebreakers had managed to decipher the Japanese communications code, so the navy was forewarned about the timing of the assault at Midway and prepared an ambush for the attacking fleet. In the battle, four Japanese aircraft carriers, along with other vessels, were destroyed. Midway was the turning point of the Pacific naval war. The victories there and in the Coral Sea allowed American forces to launch the bloody campaigns that one by one drove the Japanese from fortified islands like Guadalcanal and the Solomons in the western Pacific and brought American troops ever closer to Japan. The War in Europe The “Grand Alliance” of World War II in Europe brought together the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, each led by an iron-willed, 870 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What steps led to American participation in World War II? larger-than-life figure: Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. United in their d etermination to defeat Nazi Germany, they differed not only in terms of the societies they represented but also in their long-range goals. Stalin was set on establishing enough control over eastern Europe that his country would never again be invaded from the west. Churchill hoped to ensure that the British Empire emerged intact from the war. Roosevelt, like Woodrow Wilson before him, hoped to establish a new international order so that world wars would never again take place. Facing wars in two hemispheres, Roosevelt had to determine how best to deploy American manpower and resources. Bearing the brunt of the fighting after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin demanded an early Allied attack across the English Channel to confront German forces in occupied France and relieve pressure on his beleaguered army. Churchill’s strategy was to attack the “soft underbelly” of Axis power through Allied operations in the Mediterranean, starting with an invasion of North Africa. Churchill’s approach prevailed, and the cross-Channel invasion did not come until 1944. In November 1942, British and American forces invaded North Africa and by May 1943 forced the surrender of the German army commanded by General Erwin Rommel. By the spring of 1943, the Allies also gained the upper hand in the Atlantic, as British and American destroyers and planes devastated the German submarine fleet. But even though Roosevelt was committed to liberating Europe from Nazi control, American troops did not immediately become involved on the European continent. As late as the end of 1944, more American military personnel were deployed in the Pacific than against Germany. In July 1943, American and British forces invaded Sicily, beginning the liberation of Italy. A popular uprising in Rome overthrew the Mussolini government, whereupon Germany occupied most of the country. Fighting there raged throughout 1944. The major involvement of American troops in Europe did not begin until June 6, 1944. On that date, known as D-Day, nearly 200,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in Normandy in northwestern France. More than a million troops followed them ashore in the next few weeks, in the most massive sea–land operation in history. After fierce fighting, German armies retreated eastward. By August, Paris had been liberated. The crucial fighting in Europe, however, took place on the eastern front, the scene of an epic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million German soldiers took part in the 1941 invasion. After sweeping through western Russia, German armies in August 1942 launched a siege of Stalingrad, a city located deep inside Russia on the Volga River. This proved to be a catastrophic mistake. Bolstered by an influx of military supplies from Fighting W orld War I I ★ 871 W O R L D WA R I I I N E U R O P E , 1 9 4 2 – 1 9 4 5 D-DAY London GREAT BRITAIN Major battles Allied offensives Allied countries Neutral countries Axis countries Extent of Axis control Vichy France (controlled by Axis) Calais n el Assembly Area ish EnglCherbourg Ch an Le Havre Rouen Caen FINLAND SWEDEN FRANCE 194 4 NORWAY IRELAND DENMARK GREAT NETHERLANDS BRITAIN London D-Day June 1944 LUXEMBOURG 1945 BELGIUM 1944 Paris FRANCE Berlin 19 4 5 ITALY 194 4 3 194 ALGERIA 1 94 3 Kasserine Pass February 1943 Me d i TUNISIA terran 3 250 250 500 miles 194 Stalingrad August 1942– February 1943 4 ROMANIA ean Sea 1942 FRENCH NORTH AFRICA (Vichy France) 0 3 194 1 9 44 ALBANIA (It.) GREECE 194 0 Kursk July 1943 BULGARIA Rome 1942 1943 Moscow SOVIET UNION YUGOSLAVIA SPAIN 1942 Algiers Oran Warsaw 1944 AUSTRIA HUNGARY 1944 1 9 44 Casablanca MOROCCO 1945 4 194 Battle of the Bulge POLAND December 1944 1945 19 45 CZECHOSLOVAKIA SWITZERLAND SPANISH MOROCCO LATVIA LITHUANIA EAST PRUSSIA GERMANY Vichy PORTUGAL 194 4 Leningrad ESTONIA LIBYA (Italy) TURKEY SYRIA (Fr.) IRAQ LEBANON (Br.) (Fr.) PALESTINE El Alamein (Br.) October– November 1942 TRANSJORDAN (Br.) SAUDI ARABIA EGYPT 500 kilometers Most of the land fighting in Europe during World War II took place on the eastern front between the German and Soviet armies. the United States, the Russians surrounded the German troops and forced them to surrender. Some 800,000 Germans and 1.2 million Russians perished in the fighting. The G erman surrender at Stalingrad in January 1943 marked the turning point of the European war. Combined with a Russian victory at Kursk six months later in the greatest tank battle in history, the campaign in the east devastated Hitler’s forces and sent surviving units on a long retreat back toward Germany. Of 13.6 million German casualties in World War II, 10 million came on the Russian front. They represented only part of the war’s vast toll in 872 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? human lives. Millions of Poles and at least 20 million Russians, probably many more, perished—not only soldiers but civilian victims of starvation, disease, and massacres by German soldiers. After his armies had penetrated eastern Europe in 1941, moreover, Hitler embarked on the “final s olution”— the mass extermination of “undesirable” peoples—Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, Jews. By 1945, 6 million Jewish men, women, and children had died in Nazi death camps. What came to be called the Holocaust was the horrifying culmination of the Nazi belief that Germans constituted a “master race” destined to rule the world. THE HOME FRONT Mobilizing for War By the end of World War II, some 50 million American men had registered for the draft and 10 million had been inducted into the military. The army exemplified how the war united American society in new ways. Military service threw together Americans from every region and walk of life, and almost every racial and ethnic background (African-Americans continued to serve in segregated units). It brought into contact young men who would never have encountered each other in peacetime. Many were the children of immigrants who now emerged from urban ethnic communities to fight alongside Americans from rural regions with very different cultures and outlooks. The federal government ended voluntary enlistment in 1942, relying entirely on the draft for manpower. This ensured that wartime sacrifice was widely shared throughout American society. By contrast, in the decades following the Vietnam War, the armed forces have been composed entirely of volunteers and the military includes very few men and women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. World War II also transformed the role of the national government. FDR created federal agencies like the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, and the Office of Price Administration to regulate the allocation of labor, control the shipping industry, establish manufacturing quotas, and fix wages, prices, and rents. The number of federal workers rose from 1 million to 4 million, part of a tremendous growth in new jobs that pushed the unemployment rate down from 14 percent in 1940 to 2 percent three years later. The government built housing for war workers and forced civilian industries to retool for war production. Michigan’s auto factories now turned out trucks, tanks, and jeeps for the army. By 1944, American factories produced a ship every day and a plane every five minutes. The gross national product rose T he H ome F ront ★ 873 from $91 billion to $214 billion during the war, and the federal government’s expenditures amounted to twice the combined total of the previous 150 years. The government marketed billions of dollars’ worth of war bonds, increased taxes, and began the practice of withholding income tax directly from weekly paychecks. Before the war, only the 4 million wealthiest Americans paid income taxes; by 1945, more than 40 million did so. The government, one historian writes, moved during the war from “class taxation” to “mass taxation.” Business and the War The relationship between the federal government and big business changed dramatically from the days of the Second New Deal. “If you are going to go to war in a capitalist country,” observed Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “you had better let business make money out of the process.” As corporate executives flooded into federal agencies concerned with war production, Roosevelt offered incentives to spur production—low-interest loans, tax concessions, and contracts with guaranteed profits. The great bulk of federal spending went to the largest corporations, furthering the long-term trend toward economic concentration. By the end of the war, the 200 biggest industrial companies accounted for almost half of all corporate assets in the United States. Americans marveled at the achievements of wartime m anufacturing. Thousands of aircraft, 100,000 armored v ehicles, and 2.5 million trucks rolled off American assembly lines, and entirely new products like synthetic rubber replaced natural resources now controlled by Japan. Government-sponsored scientific research perfected inventions like radar, jet engines, and early computers that helped to win the war and would have a large impact on postwar life. These accomplishments not only made it possible to win a two-front war but also helped to restore the reputation of business and businessmen, which had reached a low point during the Depression. Federal funds reinvigorated established manufacturing areas and created entirely new industrial centers. World War II saw the West Coast emerge as a focus of military-industrial production. The government invested billions of dollars in the shipyards of Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco and in the steel plants and aircraft factories of southern California. By the war’s end, California had received one-tenth of all federal spending, and Los Angeles had become the nation’s second largest manufacturing center. Nearly 2 million Americans moved to California for jobs in defense-related industries, and millions more passed through for military training and embarkation to the Pacific war. In the South, the combination of rural out-migration and government investment in military-related factories and shipyards hastened a shift from agricultural to industrial employment. During the war, southern per capita income rose 874 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? WA R T I M E A R M Y A N D N AV Y B A S E S A N D A I R F I E L D S Airfields, bases, and stations Army camps, forts, and posts Naval bases 0 0 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers As this map indicates, the military and naval facilities built by the federal government during World War II were concentrated in the South and West, sparking the economic development of these regions. from 60 percent to 70 percent of the national average. But the South remained very poor when the war ended. Much of its rural population still lived in small wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing. The region had only two cities— Houston and New Orleans—with populations exceeding 500,000. Despite the expansion of war production, the South’s economy still relied on agriculture and extractive industries—mining, lumber, oil—or manufacturing linked to farming, like the production of cotton textiles. Labor in Wartime Organized labor repeatedly described World War II as a crusade for freedom that would expand economic and political democracy at home and abroad and win for unions a major voice in politics and industrial management. During the war, labor entered a three-sided arrangement with government and business that allowed union membership to soar to unprecedented levels. In order to secure industrial peace and stabilize war production, the T he H ome F ront ★ 875 federal government forced reluctant employers to recognize unions. In 1944, when Montgomery Ward, the large mail-order company, defied a pro-union order, the army seized its headquarters and physically evicted its president. For their part, union leaders agreed not to strike and conceded employers’ right to “managerial prerogatives” and a “fair profit.” Despite the gains produced by labor militancy during the 1930s, unions only became firmly established in many sectors of the economy during World War II. By 1945, union membership stood at nearly 15 million, one-third of the non-farm labor force and the highest proportion in American history. But if labor became a partner in government, it was very much a junior partner. The decline of the New Deal, already evident in the late 1930s, proceeded during the war. Congress continued to be dominated by a conservative alliance of Republicans and southern Democrats. They left intact core New Deal programs like Social Security but eliminated agencies thought to be controlled by leftists, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, National Youth Administration, and Works Progress Administration. Congress rejected Roosevelt’s call for a cap on personal incomes and set taxes on corporate profits at a level far lower than FDR requested. Despite the “no-strike” pledge, 1943 and 1944 witnessed numerous brief walkouts in which workers protested the increasing speed of assembly-line production and the disparity between wages frozen by government order and expanding corporate profits. Fighting for the Four Freedoms Previous conflicts, including the Mexican War and World War I, had deeply divided American society. In contrast, World War II came to be remembered as the Good War, a time of national unity in pursuit of indisputably noble goals. But all wars require the mobilization of patriotic public opinion. By 1940, “To sell goods, we must sell words” had become a motto of advertisers. Foremost among the words that helped to “sell” World War II was “freedom.” Talk of freedom pervaded wartime America. To Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms expressed deeply held American values worthy of being spread worldwide. Freedom from fear meant not only a longing for peace but also a more general desire for security in a world that appeared to be out of control. Freedom of speech and religion scarcely required detailed explanation. But their prominent place among the Four Freedoms accelerated the process by which First Amendment protections of free expression moved to the center of Americans’ definition of liberty. In 1941, the administration celebrated with considerable fanfare the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution). FDR described their protections against tyrannical government as defining characteristics of American life, central to the rights of “free 876 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? men and free women.” In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed a 1940 ruling and, on First Amendment grounds, upheld the right of J ehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the American flag in public schools. The decision stood in sharp contrast to the coercive patriotism of World War I, and it affirmed the sanctity of individual conscience as a bedrock of freedom, even in times of crisis. The justices contrasted the American system of constitutional protection for unpopular minorities with Nazi tyranny. Freedom from Want The “most ambiguous” of the Four Freedoms, Fortune magazine remarked, was freedom from want. Yet this “great inspiring phrase,” as a Pennsylvania steelworker put it in a letter to the president, seemed to strike the deepest chord in a nation just emerging from the Depression. Roosevelt initially meant it to refer to the elimination of barriers to international trade. But he quickly came to link freedom from want to an economic goal more relevant to the average citizen— protecting the future “standard of living of the American worker and farmer” by guaranteeing that the Depression would not resume after the war. This, he declared, would bring “real freedom for the common man.” When Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the Four Freedoms first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, each was accompanied by a brief essay. Three of these essays, by the celebrated authors Stephen Vincent Benét, Booth Tarkington, and Will Durant, emphasized that the values Rockwell depicted were essentially American and the opposite of those of the Axis powers. For Freedom from Want, the editors chose an unknown Filipino poet, Carlos Bulosan, who had emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. Bulosan’s essay showed how the Four Freedoms could inspire hopes for a better future as well as nostalgia for Rockwell’s imagined small-town past. Bulosan wrote of those Americans still outside the social mainstream—migrant workers, cannery laborers, black victims of segregation—for whom freedom meant having enough to eat, sending their children to school, and being able to “share the promise and fruits of American life.” The Office of War Information The history of the Office of War Information (OWI), created in 1942 to mobilize public opinion, illustrates how the political divisions generated by the New Deal affected efforts to promote the Four Freedoms. The liberal Democrats who dominated the OWI’s writing staff sought to make the conflict “a ‘people’s war’ for freedom.” The OWI feared that Americans had only a vague understanding of the war’s purposes and that the populace seemed more fervently committed to paying back the Japanese for their attack on T he H ome F ront ★ 877 Each side in World War II invoked history to rally support for its cause. The poster issued by the Office of War Information in the United States links the words of Abraham Lincoln to the struggle against Nazi tyranny. Pearl Harbor than ridding the world of fascism. They utilized radio, film, the press, and other media to give the conflict an ideological meaning, while seeking to avoid the nationalist hysteria of World War I. Wartime mobilization drew on deep-seated American traditions. The portrait of the United States holding aloft the torch of liberty in a world overrun by oppression reached back at least as far as the American Revolution. The description of a world half slave and half free recalled the Great Emancipator. But critics charged that the OWI seemed most interested in promoting the definition of freedom Roosevelt had emphasized during the 1930s. One of its first pamphlets listed as elements of freedom the right to a job at fair pay and to adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Concerned that the OWI was devoting as much time to promoting New Deal social programs as to the war effort, Congress eliminated most of its funding. The Fifth Freedom After Congress curtailed the OWI, the “selling of America” became overwhelmingly a private affair. Under the watchful eye of the War Advertising Council, private companies joined in the campaign to promote wartime patriotism, while positioning themselves and their brand names for the postwar world. Alongside advertisements urging Americans to purchase war bonds, guard against revealing military secrets, and grow “victory gardens” to allow food to be sent to the army, the war witnessed a burst of messages marketing advertisers’ definition of freedom. Without directly criticizing Roosevelt, they repeatedly suggested that he had overlooked a fifth freedom. The National Association of Manufacturers and individual companies bombarded Americans with press releases, radio programs, and advertisements attributing the amazing feats of wartime production to “free enterprise.” 878 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? Americans on the home front enjoyed a prosperity many could scarcely remember. Despite the rationing of scarce consumer items like coffee, meat, and gasoline, consumers found more goods available in 1944 than when the war began. With the memory of the Depression still very much alive, businessmen predicted a postwar world filled with consumer goods, with “freedom of choice” among abundant possibilities assured if only private enterprise were liberated from government controls. One advertisement for Royal typewriters, entitled “What This War Is All About,” explained that victory would “hasten the day when you . . . can once more walk into any store in the land and buy anything you want.” Certainly, ads suggested, the war did not imply any alteration in American institutions. “I’m fighting for freedom,” said a soldier in an ad by the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation. “So don’t anybody tell me I’ll find America changed.” Women at Work During the war, the nation engaged in an unprecedented mobilization of “womanpower” to fill industrial jobs vacated by men. OWI publications encouraged women to go to work, Hollywood films glorified the independent woman, and private advertising celebrated the achievements of Rosie the Riveter, the female industrial laborer depicted as muscular and self-reliant in Norman Rockwell’s famous magazine cover. With 15 million men in the armed forces, women in 1944 made up more than one-third of the civilian labor force, and 350,000 served in auxiliary military units. Even though most women workers still labored in clerical and service jobs, new opportunities suddenly opened in industrial, professional, and government positions previously restricted to men. On the West Coast, one-third of the workers in aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding were women. For the first time in history, married women in their thirties outnumbered the young and single among female workers. Women forced unions like the United Auto Workers to confront issues like equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, and childcare facilities for working mothers. Defense companies sponsored swing bands and dances to boost worker morale and arranged dates between male and female workers. Having enjoyed what one wartime worker called “a taste of freedom”—doing “men’s” jobs for men’s wages and, sometimes, engaging in sexual activity while unmarried—many women hoped to remain in the labor force once peace returned. The Pull of Tradition “We as a nation,” proclaimed one magazine article, “must change our basic attitude toward the work of women.” But change proved difficult. The government, T he H ome F ront ★ 879 employers, and unions depicted work as a temporary necessity, not an expansion of women’s freedom. Advertisements assured women laboring in factories that they, too, were “fighting for freedom.” But their language spoke of sacrifice and military victory, not rights, independence, or self-determination. One union publication even declared, “There should be a law requiring the women who have taken over men’s jobs to be laid off after the war.” When the war ended, most female war workers, This photograph captures the enthusiasm of especially those in better-paying industhree “fly girls”—female pilots employed by the air force to deliver cargo and passengers and trial employment, did indeed lose their test military aircraft. Known as WASPs (Women jobs. Airforce Service Pilots), they eventually numDespite the upsurge in the numbered over 1,000 aviators, who trained at an ber of working women, the advertisers’ all-female base at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. They did not take part in combat, but “world of tomorrow” rested on a vision thirty-eight died in service. of family-centered prosperity. Like Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings, these wartime discussions of freedom simultaneously looked forward to a day of material abundance and back to a time when the family stood as the bedrock of society. The “American way of life” celebrated during the war centered on the woman with “a husband to meet every night at the door,” and a home stocked with household appliances and consumer goods. Advertisements portrayed working women dreaming of their boyfriends in the army and emphasized that with the proper makeup, women could labor in a factory and remain attractive to men. Men in the army seem to have assumed that they would return home to resume traditional family life. In one wartime radio program, a young man described his goal for peacetime: “Havin’ a home and some kids, and breathin’ fresh air out in the suburbs . . . livin’ and workin’ decent, like free people.” VISIONS OF POSTWAR FREEDOM Toward an American Century The prospect of an affluent future provided a point of unity between New Dealers and conservatives, business and labor. And the promise of prosperity to some extent united two of the most celebrated blueprints for the postwar world. One was The American Century, publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 effort to mobilize 880 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What visions of America’s postwar role began to emerge during the war? the American people both for the coming war and for an era of postwar world leadership. Americans, Luce’s book insisted, must embrace the role history had thrust upon them as the “dominant power in the world.” They must seize the opportunity to share with “all peoples” their “magnificent industrial products” and the “great American ideals,” foremost among which stood “love of freedom.” After the war, American power and American values would underpin a previously unimaginable prosperity—“the abundant life,” Luce called it—produced by “free economic enterprise.” The idea of an American mission to spread democracy and freedom goes back to the Revolution. But traditionally, it had envisioned the country as an example, not an active agent imposing the American model throughout the globe. Luce’s essay anticipated important aspects of the postwar world. But its bombastic rhetoric and a title easily interpreted as a call for an American imperialism aroused immediate opposition among liberals and the left. Henry Wallace offered their response in “The Price of Free World Victory,” an address delivered in May 1942 to the Free World Association. Wallace, secretary of agriculture during the 1930s and one of the more liberal New Dealers, had replaced Vice President John Nance Garner as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1940. In contrast to Luce’s American Century, a world of business dominance no less than of American power, Wallace predicted that the war would usher in a “century of the common man.” The “march of freedom,” said Wallace, would continue in the postwar world. That world, however, would be marked by international cooperation, not any single power’s rule. Governments acting to “humanize” capitalism and redistribute economic resources would eliminate hunger, illiteracy, and poverty. Luce and Wallace both spoke the language of freedom. Luce offered a confident vision of worldwide free enterprise, while Wallace anticipated a global New Deal. But they had one thing in common—a new conception of America’s role in the world, tied to continued international involvement, the promise of economic abundance, and the idea that the American experience should serve as a model for all other nations. Neither took into account the ideas that other countries might have developed as to how to proceed once the war had ended. “The Way of Life of Free Men” Even as Congress moved to dismantle parts of the New Deal, liberal Democrats and their left-wing allies unveiled plans for a postwar economic policy that would allow all Americans to enjoy freedom from want. In 1942 and 1943, the reports of the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) offered a blueprint for a peacetime economy based on full employment, an expanded welfare state, and a widely shared American standard of living. Economic security and full Visions of P ostwar F reedom ★ 881 employment were the board’s watchwords. It called for a “new bill of rights” that would include all Americans in an expanded Social Security system and guarantee access to education, health care, adequate housing, and jobs for able-bodied adults. The NRPB’s plan for a “full-employment economy” with a “fair distribution of income,” said The Nation, embodied “the way of life of free men.” The reports continued a shift in liberals’ outlook that dated from the late 1930s. Rather than seeking to reform the institutions of capitalism, liberals would henceforth rely on government spending to secure full employment, social welfare, and mass consumption, while leaving the operation of the economy in private hands. The reports appeared to reflect the views of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who, as noted in the previous chapter, had identified government spending as the best way to promote economic growth, even if it caused budget deficits. The war had, in effect, ended the Depression by implementing a military version of Keynesianism. In calling for massive spending on job creation and public works—urban redevelopment, rural electrification, an overhaul of the transportation system, and the like—the NRPB proposed the continuation of Keynesian spending in peacetime. But this went so far beyond what Congress was willing to support that it eliminated the NRPB’s funding. An Economic Bill of Rights Mindful that public-opinion polls showed a large majority of Americans favoring a guarantee of employment for those who could not find work, the president in 1944 called for an “Economic Bill of Rights.” The original Bill of Rights restricted the power of government in the name of liberty. FDR proposed to expand its power in order to secure full employment, an adequate income, medical care, education, and a decent home for all Americans. Already ill and preoccupied with the war, Roosevelt spoke only occasionally of the Economic Bill of Rights during the 1944 presidential campaign. The replacement of Vice President Henry Wallace by Harry S. Truman, then a little-known senator from Missouri, suggested that the president did not intend to do battle with Congress over social policy. Congress did not enact the Economic Bill of Rights. But in 1944, it extended to the millions of returning veterans an array of benefits, including unemployment pay, scholarships for further education, low-cost mortgage loans, pensions, and job training. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights, was one of the most far-reaching pieces of social legislation in American history. Aimed at rewarding members of the armed forces for their service and preventing the widespread unemployment and economic disruption that had followed World War I, it profoundly 882 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What visions of America’s postwar role began to emerge during the war? shaped postwar society. By 1946, more than 1 million veterans were attending college under its provisions, making up half of total college enrollment. Almost 4 million would receive home mortgages, spurring the postwar suburban housing boom. During 1945, unions, civil rights organizations, and religious groups urged Congress to enact the Full Employment Bill, which tried to do for the entire economy what the GI Bill promised veterans. The measure established a “right to employment” for all Americans and required the federal government to increase its level of spending to create enough jobs in case the economy failed to do so. The target of an intense business lobbying campaign, the bill only passed in 1946 with the word “Full” removed from its title and after its commitment to governmental job creation had been eliminated. But as the war drew to a close, most Americans embraced the idea that the government must continue to play a major role in maintaining employment and a high standard of living. The Road to Serfdom The failure of the Full Employment Bill confirmed the political stalemate that had begun with the elections of 1938. It also revealed the renewed intellectual respectability of fears that economic planning represented a threat to liberty. When the New Republic spoke of full employment as the “road to freedom,” it subtly acknowledged the impact of The Road to Serfdom (1944), a surprise best-seller by Friedrich A. Hayek, a previously obscure Austrian-born economist. Hayek claimed that even the best-intentioned government efforts to direct the economy posed a threat to individual liberty. He offered a simple message—“Planning leads to dictatorship.” Coming at a time when the miracles of war production had reinvigorated belief in the virtues of capitalism, and with the confrontation with Nazism highlighting the danger of merging economic and political power, Hayek offered a new intellectual justification for opponents of active government. In a complex economy, he insisted, no single person or group of experts could possibly possess enough knowledge to direct economic activity intelligently. A free market, he wrote, mobilizes the fragmented and partial knowledge scattered throughout society far more effectively than a planned economy. Unlike many of his disciples, Hayek was not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez-faire. His book endorsed measures that later conservatives would denounce as forms of socialism—minimum wage and maximum hours laws, antitrust enforcement, and a social safety net guaranteeing all citizens a basic minimum of food, shelter, and clothing. Hayek, moreover, criticized traditional conservatives for fondness for social hierarchy and authoritarian government. “I am not a conservative,” he would later write. But by equating fascism, Visions of P ostwar F reedom ★ 883 socialism, and the New Deal and by identifying economic planning with a loss of freedom, he helped lay the foundation for the rise of modern conservatism and a revival of laissez-faire economic thought. As the war drew to a close, the stage was set for a renewed battle over the government’s proper role in society and the economy, and the social conditions of American freedom. THE AMERICAN DILEMMA The unprecedented attention to freedom as the defining characteristic of American life had implications that went far beyond wartime mobilization. World War II reshaped Americans’ understanding of themselves as a people. The struggle against Nazi tyranny and its theory of a master race discredited ethnic and racial inequality. Originally promoted by religious and ethnic minorities in the 1920s and the Popular Front in the 1930s, a pluralist vision of American society now became part of official rhetoric. What set the United States apart from its wartime foes, the government insisted, was not only dedication to the ideals of the Four Freedoms but also the principle that Americans of all races, religions, and national origins could enjoy those freedoms equally. Racism was the enemy’s philosophy; Americanism rested on toleration of diversity and equality for all. By the end of the war, the new immigrant groups had been fully accepted as loyal ethnic Americans, rather than members of distinct and inferior “races.” And the contradiction between the principle of equal freedom and the actual status of blacks had come to the forefront of national life. Patriotic Assimilation Among other things, World War II created a vast melting pot, especially for European immigrants and their children. Millions of Americans moved out of urban ethnic neighborhoods and isolated rural enclaves into the army and industrial plants where they came into contact with people of very different backgrounds. What one historian has called their “patriotic assimilation” differed sharply from the forced Americanization of World War I. While the Wilson administration had established Anglo-Saxon culture as a national norm, Roosevelt promoted pluralism as the only source of harmony in a diverse society. The American way of life, wrote the novelist Pearl Buck in an OWI pamphlet, rested on brotherhood—the principle that “persons of many lands can live together . . . and if they believe in freedom they can become a united people.” 884 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? Government and private agencies eagerly promoted equality as the definition of Americanism and a counterpoint to Nazism. Officials rewrote history to establish racial and ethnic tolerance as the American way. To be an American, FDR declared, had always been a “matter of mind and heart,” and “never . . . a matter of race or ancestry”—a statement more effective in mobilizing support for the war than in accurately describing the nation’s past. Mindful of the intolerance spawned by World War I, the OWI highlighted nearly every group’s contributions to American life and celebrated the strength of a people united in respect for diversity. One OWI pamphlet described prejudice as a foreign import rather than a homegrown product and declared bigots more dangerous than spies—they were “fighting for the enemy.” Horrified by the uses to which the Nazis put the idea of inborn racial difference, biological and social scientists abandoned belief in a link among race, culture, and intelligence, an idea only recently central to their disciplines. Ruth Benedict’s Races and Racism (1942) described racism as “a travesty of scientific knowledge.” In the same year, Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race became a best-seller. By the war’s end, racism and nativism had been stripped of intellectual respectability, at least outside the South, and were viewed as psychological disorders. Hollywood, too, did its part, portraying fighting units whose members, representing various regional, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, put aside group loyalties and prejudices for the common cause. Air Force featured a bomber crew that included an Anglo-Saxon officer, a Jewish sergeant, and a Polish-American gunner. In the film Bataan, the ethnically balanced platoon included a black soldier, even though the real army was racially segregated. The war’s most popular motion picture, This Is the Army, starring, among others, future president Ronald Reagan, offered a vision of postwar society that celebrated the ethnic diversity of the American people. Intolerance, of course, hardly disappeared from American life. One correspondent complained to Norman Rockwell that he included too many “foreign-looking” faces in his Freedom of Worship painting. Many business and government circles still excluded Jews. Along with the fact that early reports of the Holocaust were too terrible to be believed, anti-Semitism contributed to the government’s unwillingness to allow more than a handful of European Jews (21,000 during the course of the war) to find refuge in the United States. Roosevelt himself learned during the war of the extent of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish presence in Europe. But he failed to authorize air strikes that might have destroyed German death camps. Nonetheless, the war made millions of ethnic Americans, especially the children of the new immigrants, feel fully American for the first time. During the war, one New York “ethnic” recalled, “the Italo-Americans stopped being The American D ilemma ★ 885 Italo and started becoming Americans.” But the event that inspired this comment, the Harlem race riot of 1943, suggested that patriotic assimilation stopped at the color line. The Bracero Program The war had a far more ambiguous meaning for non-white groups than for whites. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, racial barriers remained deeply entrenched in American life. Southern blacks were still trapped in a rigid system of segregation. Asians could not emigrate to the United States or become naturalized citizens. As noted in the previous chapter, more than 400,000 Mexican- Americans had been “voluntarily” repatriated by local authorities in the One series of posters issued by the Office of War Southwest during the Depression. Most Information to mobilize support for the war effort American Indians still lived on reservaemphasized respect for the country’s racial and ethnic diversity. This one, directed at Hispanics, tions, in dismal poverty. suggests that there is no contradiction between The war set in motion changes that pride in ethnic heritage and loyalty to the United would reverberate in the postwar years. States. Under the bracero program agreed to by the Mexican and American governments in 1942 (the name derives from brazo, the Spanish word for arm), tens of thousands of contract laborers crossed into the United States to take up jobs as domestic and agricultural workers. Initially designed as a temporary response to the wartime labor shortage, the program lasted until 1964. During the period of the bracero program, more than 4.5 million Mexicans entered the United States under government labor contracts (while a slightly larger number were arrested for illegal entry by the Border Patrol). Braceros were supposed to receive decent housing and wages. But since they could not become citizens and could be deported at any time, they found it almost impossible to form unions or secure better working conditions. Although the bracero program reinforced the status of immigrants from Mexico as an unskilled labor force, wartime employment opened new opportunities for second-generation Mexican-Americans. Hundreds of thousands of men and women emerged from ethnic neighborhoods, or barrios, to work in defense industries and serve in the army (where, unlike blacks, they fought 886 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? alongside whites). For Mexican-American women in particular, the war afforded new opportunities for public participation and higher incomes. “Rosita the Riveter” took her place alongside “Rosie” in the West Coast’s multiethnic war production factories. Government publications and newspaper accounts celebrated their role as patriotic mothers who encouraged their sons to enlist in the army and offered moral support while they were away at war. A new “Chicano” culture—a fusion of Mexican heritage and American experience—was being born. Contact with other groups led many to learn English and sparked a rise in interethnic marriages. Mexican-American Rights The zoot suit riots of 1943, in which club-wielding sailors and policemen attacked Mexican-American youths wearing flamboyant clothing on the streets of Los Angeles, illustrated the limits of wartime tolerance. But the contrast between the war’s rhetoric of freedom and pluralism and the reality of continued discrimination inspired a heightened consciousness of civil rights. Mexican-Americans brought complaints of discrimination before the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to fight the practice in the Southwest of confining them to the lowest-paid work or paying them lower wages than white workers doing the same jobs. Perhaps half a million Mexican-American men and women served in the armed forces. And with discrimination against Mexicans an increasing embarrassment in view of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Texas (the state with the largest population of Mexican descent) in 1943 unanimously passed the oddly-named Caucasian Race—Equal Privileges resolution. It stated that since “all the nations of the North and South American continents” were united in the struggle against Nazism, “all persons of the Caucasian race” were entitled to equal treatment in places of public accommodation. Since Texas law had long defined Mexicans as white, the measure applied to them while not challenging the segregation of blacks. The resolution lacked an enforcement mechanism. Indeed, because of continued discrimination in Texas, the Mexican government for a time prohibited the state from receiving laborers under the bracero program. Indians during the War The war also brought many American Indians closer to the mainstream of American life. Some 25,000 served in the army (including the famous Navajo “code-talkers,” who transmitted messages in their complex native language, which the Japanese could not decipher). Insisting that the United States lacked the authority to draft Indian men into the army, the Iroquois issued their own The American D ilemma ★ 887 VOICES OF FREEDOM From League of United Latin American Citizens, “World War II and Mexican Americans” (1945) Founded in 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) campaigned for equal treatment for Americans of Latino descent and their full integration into American life. Soon after the war ended, an editorial in its publication LULAC News condemned continuing discrimination, reflecting how the war sparked a rising demand for equal rights among many minority groups. “We do not serve Mexicans here.” “You will have to get out as no Mexicans are allowed.” “Your uniform and service ribbons mean nothing here. We still do not allow Mexicans.” These, and many other stronger-worded ones, are the embarrassing and humiliating retorts given our returning veterans of Latin American descent and their families. They may all be worded differently, and whereas some are toned with hate and loathness while others are toned with sympathy and remorse, still the implication remains that these so-called “Mexicans” are considered unworthy of equality, regardless of birthright or service. . . . Why this hate, this prejudice, this tendency to discriminate against a people whose only fault seems to be that they are heirs of a culture older than any known “American Culture,” to find themselves a part of a land and people they have helped to build and to defend, to find themselves a part of a minority group whose acquired passive nature keeps them from boldly demanding those rights and privileges which are rightfully theirs? Can it be the result of difference in race, nationality, language, loyalty, or ability? There is no difference in race. Latin Americans, or so-called “Mexicans,” are Caucasian or white. . . . There is no difference in nationality. These “Mexicans” were born and bred in this country and are just as American as Jones or Smith. . . . Difference in language? No, these “Mexicans” speak English. Accented, perhaps, in some cases, but English all over the United States seems to be accented. . . . Difference in loyalty? How can that be when all revere the same stars and stripes, when they don the same service uniforms for the same principles? Difference in intelligence and ability? Impossible. . . . This condition is not a case of difference; it is a case of ignorance. . . . An ignorance of the cultural contributions of Americans of Latin American descent to the still young American Culture; . . . an ignorance of a sense of appreciation for a long, profitable, and loyal association with a group of Americans whose voice cries out in desperate supplication: “We have proved ourselves true and loyal Americans . . . now give us social, political, and economic equality.” 888 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I From Charles H. Wesley, “The Negro Has Always Wanted the Four Freedoms,” in What the Negro Wants (1944) In 1944, the University of North Carolina Press published What the Negro Wants, a book of essays by fourteen prominent black leaders. Virtually every contributor called for the right to vote in the South, the dismantling of segregation, and access to the “American standard of living.” Several essays also linked the black struggle for racial justice with movements against European imperialism in Africa and Asia. When he read the manuscript, W. T. Couch, the director of the press, was stunned. “If this is what the Negro wants,” he told the book’s editor, “nothing could be clearer than what he needs, and needs most urgently, is to revise his wants.” In this excerpt, the historian Charles H. Wesley explains that blacks are denied each of the Four Freedoms, and also illustrates how the war strengthened black internationalism. [Negroes] have wanted what other citizens of the United States have wanted. They have wanted freedom and opportunity. They have wanted the pursuit of the life vouchsafed to all citizens of the United States by our own liberty documents. They have wanted freedom of speech, [but] they were supposed to be silently acquiescent in all aspects of their life. . . . They have wanted freedom of religion, for they had been compelled to “steal away to Jesus” . . . in order to worship God as they desired. . . . They have wanted freedom from want. . . . However, the Negro has remained a marginal worker and the competition with white workers has left him in want in many localities of an economically sufficient nation. They have wanted freedom from fear. They have been cowed, browbeaten or beaten, as they have marched through the years of American life. . . . The Negro wants democracy to begin at home. . . . The future of our democratic life is insecure so long as the hatred, disdain and disparagement of Americans of African ancestry exist. . . . The Negro wants not only to win the war but also to win the peace. . . . He wants the peace to be free of race and color restrictions, of imperialism and exploitation, and inclusive of the participation of minorities all over the world in their own governments. When it is said that we are fightQU E STIONS ing for freedom, the Negro asks, “Whose freedom?” Is it the freedom of a peace to 1. What evidence does the editorial offer that exploit, suppress, exclude, debase and Latinos are deserving of equality? restrict colored peoples in India, China, Africa, Malaya in the usual ways? . . . 2. Why does Wesley believe that black Americans are denied the Four Freedoms? Will Great Britain and the United States specifically omit from the Four Freedoms 3. What differences and what commonalities their minorities and subject peoples? The exist between these two claims for greater Negro does not want such a peace. rights in American society? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 889 declaration of war against the Axis powers. Tens of thousands of Indians left reservations for jobs in war industries. Exposed for the first time to urban life and industrial society, many chose not to return to the reservations after the war ended (indeed, the reservations did not share in wartime prosperity). Some Indian veterans took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college after the war, an opportunity that had been available to very few Indians previously. Asian-Americans in Wartime Asian-Americans’ war experience was paradoxical. More than 50,000—the children and grandchildren of immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines—fought in the army, mostly in all-Asian units. With China an ally in the Pacific war, Congress in 1943 ended decades of complete exclusion by establishing a nationality quota for Chinese immigrants. The annual limit of 105 hardly suggested a desire for a large-scale influx. But the image of the Chinese as gallant fighters defending their country against Japanese aggression called into question long-standing racial stereotypes. As in the case of Mexican-Americans, large numbers of Chinese-Americans moved out of ethnic ghettos to work alongside whites in jobs on the home front. The experience of Japanese-Americans was far different. Many Americans viewed the war against Germany as an ideological struggle. But both sides saw the Pacific war as a race war. Japanese propaganda depicted Americans as a self-indulgent people contaminated by ethnic and racial diversity as opposed to the racially “pure” Japanese. In the United States, long-standing prejudices and the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor combined to produce an unprecedented hatred of Japan. “In all our history,” according to one historian, “no foe has been detested as were the Japanese.” Government propaganda and war films portrayed the Japanese foe as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes—bestial and subhuman. They blamed Japanese aggression on a violent racial or national character, not, as in the case of Germany and Italy, on tyrannical rulers. About 70 percent of Japanese-Americans in the continental United States lived in California, where they dominated vegetable farming in the Los Angeles area. One-third were first-generation immigrants, or issei, but a substantial majority were nisei—American-born, and therefore citizens. Many of the latter spoke only English, had never been to Japan, and had tried to assimilate despite prevailing prejudice. But the Japanese-American community could not remain unaffected by the rising tide of hatred. The government bent over backward to include German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the war effort. It ordered the arrest of only a handful of the more than 800,000 German and Italian nationals in the United States when the war began. But it viewed every person of Japanese ethnicity as a potential spy. 890 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? J A PA N E S E - A M E R I C A N I N T E R N M E N T, 1 9 4 2 – 1 9 4 5 Seattle WASHINGTON Portland OREGON Cody IDAHO Klamath Falls Tule Lake Twin Falls 18,789 M I L I TA R Y Nephi Topaz 8,310 CALIFORNIA A Manzanar 10,046 Lone Pine Fresno Minidoka 9,397 Heart Mountain 10,767 MINNESOTA WISCONSIN SOUTH DAKOTA MICHIGAN WYOMING IOWA NEBRASKA UTAH Sacramento NEVADA ARE San Francisco NORTH DAKOTA MONTANA ILLINOIS COLORADO Lamar Amache 7,318 KANSAS MISSOURI OHIO KENTUCKY Bakersfield Los Angeles INDIANA TENNESSEE Poston 17,814 San Diego Pac i f i c Oc ean ARIZONA Gila Bend Gila River 13,348 OKLAHOMA NEW MEXICO ARKANSAS Pine Bluff Rohwer Jerome 8,475 8,497 ALABAMA MISSISSIPPI TEXAS LOUISIANA Internment camps Figures show highest number interned at each camp. Demarcates area from which Japanese-Americans were excluded MEXICO Gulf of Mexico 0 0 200 200 400 miles 400 kilometers More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans—the majority American citizens—were forcibly moved from their homes to internment camps during World War II. Japanese-American Internment California, as discussed in Chapter 19, had a long history of hostility toward the Japanese. Now, inspired by exaggerated fears of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast and pressured by whites who saw an opportunity to gain possession of Japanese-American property, the military persuaded FDR to issue Executive Order 9066. Promulgated in February 1942, this ordered the relocation of all persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast. That spring and summer, authorities removed more than 110,000 men, women, and children—nearly two-thirds of them American citizens—to camps far from their homes. The order did not apply to persons of Japanese descent living in Hawaii, where they represented nearly 40 percent of the population. Despite Hawaii’s vulnerability, its economy could not function without Japanese-American labor. But Japanese-American internment provided ammunition for Japan’s claim that its aggressions in Asia were intended to defend the rights of non-white peoples against colonial rule and a racist United States. The American D ilemma ★ 891 The internees were subjected to a quasi-military discipline in the camps. Living in former horse stables, makeshift shacks, or barracks behind barbed wire fences, they were awakened for roll call at 6:45 each morning and ate their meals (which rarely included the Japanese cooking to which they were accustomed) in giant mess halls. Armed guards patrolled the camps, and searchlights shone all night. Privacy was difficult to come by, and medical facilities were often nonexistent. Nonetheless, the internees did their best to create an atmosphere of home, decorating their accommodations with pictures, flowers, and curtains, planting vegetable gardens, and setting up activities like sports clubs and art classes for themselves. Internment revealed how easily war can undermine basic freedoms. There were no court hearings, no due process, and no writs of habeas corpus. One searches the wartime record in vain for public protests among non-Japanese against the gravest violation of civil liberties since the end of slavery. The press supported the policy almost unanimously. In Congress, only Senator Robert Taft of Ohio spoke out against it. Groups publicly committed to fighting discrimination, from the Communist Party to the NAACP and the American Jewish Committee, either defended the policy or remained silent. The courts refused to intervene. In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American citizen who had been arrested for refusing to present himself for internment. Speaking for a 6-3 majority, Justice Hugo Black, usually an avid defender of civil liberties, upheld the legality of the internment policy, insisting that an order applying only to persons of Japanese descent was not based on race. The Court has never overturned the Korematsu decision. As Justice Robert H. Jackson warned in his dissent, it “lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim” of national security. The government marketed war bonds to the internees. It established a loyalty oath program, expecting Japanese-Americans to swear allegiance to the government that had imprisoned them and to enlist in the army. Some young men refused, and about 200 were sent to prison for resisting the draft. “Let us out and then maybe I’ll think about risking my skin for ‘the land of the free,’ ” one of the resisters remarked. But 20,000 Japanese-Americans joined the armed forces from the camps, along with another 13,000 from Hawaii. Contradictions abounded in the wartime experiences of Japanese-Americans. In 1944, Sono Isato danced the role of an American beauty queen in the musical On the Town on Broadway, and her brother fought for the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater, while the government interned their father because he had been born in Japan. A long campaign for acknowledgment of the injustice done to Japanese-Americans followed the end of the war. In 1988, Congress apologized for internment and provided $20,000 in compensation to each surviving 892 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? victim. President Bill Clinton subsequently awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Blacks and the War Although the treatment of Japanese-Americans revealed the stubborn hold of racism in American life, the wartime message of freedom portended a major transformation in the status of blacks. “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be,” Roosevelt declared, “any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.” Yet Nazi Germany cited American practices as proof of its own race policies. Washington remained a rigidly segregated city, and the Red Cross refused to mix blood from blacks and whites in its blood banks (thereby, critics charged, in effect accepting Nazi race theories). Charles Drew, the black scientist who pioneered the techniques of storing and shipping blood plasma—a development of immense importance to the treatment of wounded soldiers—protested bitterly against this policy, pointing out that it had no scientific basis. In 1940 and 1941, even as Roosevelt called for aid to the free peoples of Europe, thirteen lynchings took place in the United States. The war spurred a movement of black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and West that dwarfed the Great Migration of World War I and the 1920s. In the second Great Migration, about 700,000 black migrants poured out of the South on what they called “liberty trains,” seeking jobs in the industrial heartland. They encountered sometimes violent hostility. In 1943, a fight at a Detroit city park spiraled into a race riot that left thirty-four persons dead, and a “hate strike” of 20,000 workers protested the upgrading of black employees in a plant manufacturing aircraft engines. The war failed to end lynching. Isaac Simmons, a black minister, was murdered in 1944 for refusing to sell his land to a white man who believed it might contain oil. The criminals went unpunished. This took place in Liberty, Mississippi. Blacks and Military Service When World War II began, the air force and marines had no black members. The army restricted the number of black enlistees and contained only five black officers, three of them chaplains. The navy accepted blacks only as waiters and cooks. During the war, more than 1 million blacks served in the armed forces. They did so in segregated units, largely confined to construction, transport, and other noncombat tasks. Many northern black draftees were sent to the South for military training, where they found themselves excluded from movie theaters and servicemen’s clubs on military bases and abused when they ventured into local towns. Black soldiers sometimes had to give up their The American D ilemma ★ 893 seats on railroad cars to accommodate Nazi prisoners of war. “Nothing so lowers Negro morale,” wrote the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, “as the frequent preferential treatment of Axis prisoners of war in contrast with Army policy toward American troops who happen to be Negro.” When southern black veterans returned home and sought benefits through the GI Bill, they encountered even more evidence of racial discrimination. On the surface, the GI Bill contained no racial differentiation in offering benefits like health care, college tuition assistance, job training, and loans to start a business or purchase a farm. But local authorities who administered its provisions allowed southern black veterans to use its education benefits only at segregated colleges, limited their job training to unskilled work and low-wage service jobs, and restricted loans for farm purchase to white veterans. Birth of the Civil Rights Movement In 1942, a public-opinion survey sponsored by the army’s Bureau of Intelligence found that the vast majority of white Americans were “unaware that there is any such thing as a ‘Negro problem’” and were convinced that blacks were satisfied with their social and economic conditions. They would soon discover their mistake. The war years witnessed the birth of the modern civil rights movement. Angered by the almost complete exclusion of African-Americans from jobs in the rapidly expanding war industries (of 100,000 aircraft workers in 1940, fewer than 300 were blacks), the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in July 1941 called for a March on Washington. His demands included access to defense employment, an end to segregation, and a national antilynching law. Randolph, who as founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had long battled racism among both employers and unions, hurled Roosevelt’s rhetoric back at the president. Randolph declared racial discrimination “undemocratic, un-American, and pro-Hitler.” The prospect of thousands of angry blacks descending on Washington, remarked one official, “scared the government half to death.” To persuade Randolph to call off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense jobs and established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to monitor compliance. The black press hailed the order as a new Emancipation Proclamation. Essentially an investigative agency, the FEPC lacked enforcement powers. But its very existence marked a significant shift in public policy. Its hearings exposed patterns of racial exclusion so ingrained that firms at first freely admitted that their want ads asked for “colored” applicants for positions as porters and janitors and “white” ones for skilled jobs, and that they allowed black women to work only as laundresses and cooks. The first federal agency since 894 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? Reconstruction to campaign for equal opportunity for black Americans, the FEPC played an important role in obtaining jobs for black workers in industrial plants and shipyards. In southern California, the aircraft manufacturer Lockheed ran special buses into black neighborhoods to bring workers to its plants. By 1944, more than 1 million blacks, 300,000 of them women, held manufacturing jobs. (“My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen,” recalled one black woman.) The Double-V When the president “said that we should have the Four Freedoms,” a black steelworker declared, he meant to include “all races.” During the war, NAACP membership grew from 50,000 to nearly 500,000. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded by an interracial group of pacifists in 1942, held sit-ins in northern cities to integrate restaurants and theaters. After a Firestone tire factory in Memphis fired a black woman for trying to enter a city bus before white passengers had been seated, black workers at the plant went on strike until she was reinstated. In February 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier coined the phrase that came to symbolize black attitudes during the war—the double-V. Victory over Germany and Japan, it insisted, must be accompanied by victory over segregation at home. While the Roosevelt administration and the white press saw the war as an expression of American ideals, black newspapers pointed to the gap between those ideals and reality. Side by side with ads for war bonds, The Crisis insisted that a segregated army “cannot fight for a free world.” Surveying wartime public opinion, a political scientist concluded that “symbols of national solidarity” had very different meanings to white and black Americans. To blacks, freedom from fear meant, among other things, an end to lynching, and freedom from want included doing away with “discrimination in getting jobs.” If, in whites’ eyes, freedom was a “possession to be defended,” he observed, to blacks and other racial minorities it remained a “goal to be achieved.” “Our fight for freedom,” said a returning black veteran of the Pacific war, “begins when we get to San Francisco.” What the Negro Wants During the war, a broad political coalition centered on the left but reaching well beyond it called for an end to racial inequality in America. The NAACP and American Jewish Congress cooperated closely in advocating laws to ban discrimination in employment and housing. Despite considerable resistance from rank-and-file white workers, CIO unions, especially those with strong left-liberal and communist influence, made significant efforts to organize black workers and win them The American D ilemma ★ 895 access to skilled positions. AFL craft unions by and large continued their long tradition of excluding black workers. But during World War II, the CIO was probably more racially integrated than any labor organization since the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. As blacks demanded an end to segregation, southern politicians took up the cry of protecting white supremacy. The latter also spoke the language of A sign displayed opposite a Detroit housing projfreedom. Defenders of the racial status ect in 1942 symbolizes one aspect of what Gunquo interpreted freedom to mean the nar Myrdal called “the American Dilemma”—the persistence of racism in the midst of a worldwide right to shape their region’s institutions struggle for freedom. without outside interference. The “war emergency,” insisted Governor Frank Dixon of Alabama, “should not be used as a pretext to bring about the abolition of the color line.” Even as the war gave birth to the modern civil rights movement, it also planted the seeds for the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation during the 1950s. In the rest of the country, however, the status of black Americans assumed a place at the forefront of enlightened liberalism. Far more than in the 1930s, federal officials spoke openly of the need for a d ramatic change in race relations. American democracy, noted Secretary of War Stimson, had not yet addressed “the persistent legacy of the original crime of slavery.” Progress came slowly. But the National War Labor Board banned racial wage differentials. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Supreme Court outlawed all-white primaries, one of the mechanisms by which southern states deprived blacks of political rights. In the same year, the navy began assigning small numbers of black sailors to previously all-white ships. In the final months of the war, it ended segregation altogether, and the army established a few combat units that included black and white soldiers. After a world tour in 1942 to rally support for the Allies, Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s opponent of 1940, published One World. It sold 1 million copies, faster than any nonfiction work in American history. Willkie’s travels persuaded him that Asia, Africa, and Latin America would play a pivotal role in the postwar era. But the book’s great surprise came in Willkie’s attack on “our imperialisms at home.” Unless the United States addressed the “mocking paradox” of racism, he insisted, its claim to world leadership would lack moral authority. “If we want to talk about freedom,” Willkie wrote, “we must mean freedom for everyone inside our frontiers.” 896 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? An American Dilemma No event reflected the new concern with the status of black Americans more than the publication in 1944 of An American Dilemma, a sprawling account of the country’s racial past, present, and future written by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal. The book offered an uncompromising portrait of how deeply racism was entrenched in law, politics, economics, and social behavior. But Myrdal combined this sobering analysis with admiration for what he called the American Creed—belief in equality, justice, equal opportunity, and freedom. The war, he argued, had made Americans more aware than ever of the contradiction between this creed and the reality of racial inequality. He concluded that “there is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro’s status as a result of this War.” Myrdal’s notion of a conflict between American values and American racial policies was hardly new—Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois had said much the same thing. But in the context of a worldwide struggle against Nazism and rising black demands for equality at home, his book struck a chord. It identified a serious national problem and seemed to offer an almost painless path to peaceful change, in which the federal government would take the lead in outlawing discrimination. This coupling of an appeal to American principles with federal social engineering established a liberal position on race relations that would survive for many years. By 1945, support for racial justice had finally taken its place on the l iberal-left agenda alongside full employment, civil liberties, and the expansion of the New Deal welfare state. Roosevelt himself rarely spoke out on racial issues. But many liberals insisted that racial discrimination must be confronted head-on through federal antilynching legislation, equal opportunity in the workplace, an end to segregated housing and schools, and the expansion of Social Security programs to cover agricultural and domestic workers. This wartime vision of a racially integrated full employment economy formed a bridge between the New Deal and the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapter 25). Black Internationalism In the nineteenth century, black radicals like David Walker and Martin Delany had sought to link the fate of African-Americans with that of peoples of African descent in other parts of the world, especially the Caribbean and Africa. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this kind of international consciousness was reinvigorated. Garveyism (discussed in Chapter 19) was one example; another was reflected in the five Pan-African Congresses that met between 1919 and 1945. Attended by black intellectuals from the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, these gatherings denounced the colonial rule of Africa and sought to establish a sense of unity among all people in the African diaspora (a term used to The American D ilemma ★ 897 describe the scattering of a people who share a single national, religious, or racial identity). At the home of George Padmore, a West Indian labor organizer and editor living in London, black American leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson came into contact with future leaders of African independence movements such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), and Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria). “I discovered Africa in London,” Robeson remarked. Through these gatherings, Du Bois, Robeson, and others developed an outlook that linked the plight of black Americans with that of people of color worldwide. Racism, they came to believe, originated not in irrational hatred but in the slave trade and slavery. In the modern age, it was perpetuated by colonialism. Thus, freeing Africa from colonial rule would encourage greater equality at home. World War II stimulated among African-Americans an even greater awareness of the links between racism in the United States and colonialism abroad. In 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, a major black newspaper, began publishing regular columns on events in India (where the British had imprisoned leaders of the movement for national independence) and China. In the same year, Robeson founded the Council on African Affairs, which tried to place colonial liberation at the top of the black American agenda. THE END OF THE WAR As 1945 opened, Allied victory was assured. In December 1944, in a desperate gamble, Hitler launched a surprise counterattack in France that pushed Allied forces back fifty miles, creating a large bulge in their lines. The largest single battle ever fought by the U.S. Army, the Battle of the Bulge produced more than 70,000 American casualties. But by early 1945 the assault had failed. In March, American troops crossed the Rhine River and entered the industrial heartland of Germany. Hitler took his own life, and shortly afterward Soviet forces occupied Berlin. On May 8, known as V-E Day (for victory in Europe), came the formal end to the war against Germany. In the Pacific, American forces moved ever closer to Japan. They reconquered Guam in August 1944 and landed in the Philippines two months later, where they destroyed most of the remainder of the enemy fleet in the naval battle of Leyte Gulf. “The Most Terrible Weapon” Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, to win an unprecedented fourth term in 1944. But FDR did not live to see the Allied victory. He succumbed to a stroke on April 12, 1945. To his successor, Harry S. Truman, fell one of the most momentous decisions ever confronted by an American president—whether to use the atomic bomb 898 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the end of the war begin to shape the postwar world? against Japan. Truman did not know about the bomb until after he became president. Then, Secretary of War Stimson informed him that the United States had secretly developed “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history.” The bomb was a practical realization of the theory of relativity, a rethinking of the laws of physics developed early in the twentieth century by the German scientist Albert Einstein. Energy and matter, Einstein showed, represented two forms of the same phenomenon. According to his famous equation E = mc2, the energy contained in matter equals its mass times the speed of light squared— an enormous amount. By using certain forms of uranium, or the man-made element plutonium, an atomic reaction could be created that transformed part of the mass into energy. This energy could be harnessed to provide a form of controlled power, or it could be unleashed in a tremendous explosion. Having fled to the United States from Hitler’s Germany, Einstein in 1939 warned Roosevelt that Nazi scientists were trying to develop an atomic weapon and urged the president to do likewise. In the following year, FDR authorized what came to be known as the Manhattan Project, a top-secret program in which American scientists developed an atomic bomb during World War II. The weapon was tested successfully in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. The Dawn of the Atomic Age On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, Japan—a target chosen because almost alone among major Japanese cities, it had not yet suffered damage. In an instant, nearly every building in the city was destroyed. Of the city’s population of 280,000 civilians and 40,000 soldiers, approximately 70,000 died immediately. Because atomic bombs release deadly radiation, the death toll kept rising in the months that followed. By the end of the year, it reached at least 140,000. Thousands more perished over the next five years. On August 9, the United States exploded a second bomb over Nagasaki, killing 70,000 persons. On the same day, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Within a week, Japan surrendered. Because of the enormous cost in civilian lives—more than twice America’s military fatalities in the entire Pacific war—the use of the bomb remains controversial. The Japanese had fought ferociously while being driven from one Pacific island after another. An American invasion of Japan, some advisers warned Truman, might cost as many as 250,000 American lives. No such invasion was planned, however, until the following year, and considerable evidence had accumulated that Japan was nearing surrender. Already some of its officials had communicated a willingness to end the war if Emperor Hirohito could remain on his throne. This fell short of the Allies’ demand for “unconditional surrender,” but the victors would, in the end, agree to Hirohito’s survival. Japan’s economy had been crippled and its fleet destroyed, and it would now The E nd of the War ★ 899 have to fight the Soviet Union as well as the United States. Some of the scientists who had worked on the bomb urged Truman to demonstrate its power to international observers. But Truman did not hesitate. The bomb was a weapon, he reasoned, and weapons are created to be used. The Nature of the War The dropping of the atomic bombs was the logical culmination of the way World War II had been fought. All wars inflict suffering on noncombatants. But never before had civilian populations been so ruthlessly targeted. Military personnel represented 90 percent of those who died in World War I. But of the estimated 50 million persons who perished during World War II (including 400,000 American soldiers), perhaps 20 million were civilians. Germany had killed millions of members of “inferior races.” It had repeatedly bombed London and other cities. The Allies carried out even more deadly air assaults on civilian populations. Early in 1945, the firebombing of Dresden killed some 100,000 people, mostly women, children, and elderly men. On March 9, nearly the same number died in an inferno caused by the bombing of Tokyo. Four years of war propaganda had dehumanized the Japanese in Americans’ eyes, and few persons criticized Truman’s decision in 1945. But public doubts began to surface, especially after John Hersey published Hiroshima (1946), a graphic account of the horrors suffered by the civilian population. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who thought the use of the bomb unnecessary, later wrote, “I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” Planning the Postwar World Even as the war raged, a series of meetings between Allied leaders formulated plans for the postwar world. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met at Tehran, Iran, in 1943, and at Yalta, in the southern Soviet Union, early in 1945, to hammer out agreements. The final “Big Three” conference took place at Potsdam, near Berlin, in July 1945. It involved Stalin, Truman, and Churchill (replaced midway in the talks by Clement Attlee, who became prime minister when his Labour Party swept the British elections). At the Potsdam conference, the Allied leaders established a military administration for Germany and agreed to place top Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes. Relations among the three Allies were often uneasy, as each maneuvered to maximize its postwar power. Neither Britain nor the United States trusted Stalin. The delay in the Allied invasion of France until 1944, which left the Soviets to do the bulk of the fighting against Germany, angered the Russians. But since Stalin’s troops had won the war on the eastern front, it was difficult to resist his demand that eastern Europe become a Soviet sphere of influence (a region whose governments can be counted on to do a great power’s bidding). 900 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the end of the war begin to shape the postwar world? Yalta and Bretton Woods At the Yalta conference, Roosevelt and Churchill entered only a mild protest against Soviet plans to retain control of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and a large part of eastern Poland, in effect restoring Russia’s pre–World War I western borders. Stalin agreed to enter the war against The Big Three—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—at their first meeting, in Tehran, Iran, Japan later in 1945, to include non- in 1943, where they discussed the opening of communists in the pro-Soviet govern- a second front against Germany in western ment of Poland, and to allow “free and Europe. unfettered elections” there. But he was intent on establishing communism in eastern Europe. He believed, as he put it to Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz (“Tito”), that in modern war, “whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.” Yalta saw the high-water mark of wartime American– Soviet cooperation. But it planted seeds of conflict, since the participants soon disagreed over the fate of eastern Europe. Tension also existed between Britain and the United States. Churchill rejected American pressure to place India and other British colonies on the road to independence. He concluded private deals with Stalin to divide southern and eastern Europe into British and Soviet spheres of influence. Britain also resisted, unsuccessfully, American efforts to reshape and dominate the postwar economic order. A meeting of representatives of forty-five nations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 replaced the British pound with the dollar as the main currency for international transactions. During the 1930s, as noted in the previous chapter, FDR had taken the United States off the gold standard, allowing the government to issue more money in the hope of stimulating business activity. The Bretton Woods conference re established the link between the dollar and gold. It set the dollar’s value at $35 per ounce of gold and gave other currencies a fixed relationship to the dollar. The conference also created two American-dominated financial institutions. The World Bank would provide money to developing countries and to help rebuild Europe. The International Monetary Fund would work to prevent governments from devaluing their currencies to gain an advantage in international trade, as many had done during the Depression. Although the details took many years to emerge, Bretton Woods created the framework for the postwar capitalist economic system, based on a freer international flow of goods and investment and a recognition of the United States as the world’s financial leader. Determined to avoid a recurrence of the Great The E nd of the War ★ 901 Depression, American leaders believed that the removal of barriers to free trade would encourage the growth of the world economy, an emphasis that remains central to American foreign policy to this day. The United Nations Early in the war, the Allies also agreed to establish a successor to the League of Nations. In a 1944 conference at Dumbarton Oaks, near Washington, D.C., they developed the structure of the United Nations (UN). There would be a General Assembly—essentially a forum for discussion where each member enjoyed an equal voice—and a Security Council responsible for maintaining world peace. Along with ten rotating members, the council would have five permanent ones—Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—each with the power to veto resolutions. In June 1945, representatives of fifty-one countries met in San Francisco to adopt the UN Charter, which outlawed force or the threat of force as a means of settling international disputes. In July, the U.S. Senate endorsed the charter. In contrast to the bitter dispute over membership in the League of Nations after World War I, only two members of the U.S. Senate voted against joining the UN. At the conclusion of the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations, President Truman urged Americans to recognize that “no matter how great our strength, we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please. This is the price which each nation will have to pay for world peace. . . . And what a reasonable price that is.” Peace, but Not Harmony World War II produced a radical redistribution of world power. Japan and Germany, the two dominant military powers in their regions before the war, were utterly defeated. Britain and France, though victorious, were substantially weakened. Only the United States and the Soviet Union were able to project significant influence beyond their national borders. Overall, however, the United States was clearly the dominant world power. “What Rome was to the ancient world,” wrote the journalist Walter Lippmann, “America is to be to the world of tomorrow.” But peace did not usher in an era of international harmony. The Soviet occupation of eastern Europe created a division soon to be solidified in the Cold War. The dropping of the atomic bombs left a worldwide legacy of fear. It remained to be seen how seriously the victorious Allies took their wartime rhetoric of freedom. In August 1941, four months before the United States entered the war, FDR and British prime minister Winston Churchill had met for a conference, on warships anchored off the coast of Newfoundland, and issued the Atlantic Charter. The charter promised that “the final destruction of Nazi tyranny” would be followed by open access to markets, the right of “all peoples” 902 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I How did the end of the war begin to shape the postwar world? to choose their form of government, and a global extension of the New Deal so that people everywhere would enjoy “improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security.” It referred specifically to two of Roosevelt’s Four F reedoms—freedom from want and freedom from fear. But freedom of speech and of worship had been left out because of British reluctance to A member of the U.S. Navy plays “Goin’ Home” apply them to its colonial possessions, on the accordian as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s body is carried from the Warm Springs Foundation especially India. The Four Freedoms speech and the where he died suddenly on April 12, 1945. Atlantic Charter had been primarily intended to highlight the differences between Anglo-American ideals and Nazism. Nonetheless, they had unanticipated consequences. As one of Roosevelt’s speechwriters remarked, “when you state a moral principle, you are stuck with it, no matter how many fingers you have kept crossed at the moment.” The language with which World War II was fought helped to lay the foundation for postwar ideals of human rights that extend to all mankind. During the war, Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader, wrote to Roosevelt that the idea “that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy seems hollow, so long as India, and for that matter, Africa, are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home.” Allied victory saved mankind from a living nightmare—a worldwide system of dictatorial rule and slave labor in which peoples deemed inferior suffered the fate of European Jews and the victims of Japanese outrages in Asia. But disputes over the freedom of colonial peoples overseas and non-whites in the United States foretold wars and social upheavals to come. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Why did most Americans support isolationism in the 1930s? 2. What factors after 1939 led to U.S. involvement in World War II? 3. H ow did government, business, and labor work together to promote wartime production, and how did the war affect each group? 4. How did different groups understand or experience the Four Freedoms differently? C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 903 5. E xplain how conservatives in Congress and business used the war effort to attack the goals and legacy of the New Deal. 6. H ow did the war alter the lives of women on the home front, and what did different groups think would happen to the status of women after the war? 7. H ow did a war fought to bring “essential human freedoms” to the world fail to protect the home-front liberties of blacks, Indians, Japanese-Americans, and Mexican-Americans? 8. E xplain how World War II promoted an awareness of the links between racism in the United States and colonialism around the world. 9. What was the impact of the GI Bill of Rights on American society, including minorities? 10. D escribe how the decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 created the framework for postwar U.S. economic and foreign policy. KEY TERMS Four Freedoms (p. 861) Korematsu v. United States (p. 892) Good Neighbor Policy (p. 864) second Great Migration (p. 893) isolationism (p. 866) double-V (p. 895) Neutrality Acts (p. 866) V-E Day (p. 898) Lend-Lease Act (p. 868) Manhattan Project (p. 899) Axis powers (p. 869) Potsdam conference (p. 900) D-Day (p. 871) Yalta conference (p. 901) Holocaust (p. 873) Bretton Woods conference (p. 901) GI Bill of Rights (p. 882) United Nations (p. 902) bracero program (p. 886) Atlantic Charter (p. 902) zoot suit riots (p. 887) Japanese-American internment (p. 891) Go to Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. 904 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fi ghti ng f or the Four Fre e d o ms : Wo rl d Wa r I I What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 23 ★ THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR 1945–1953 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War? • How did the Cold War reshape ideas of American freedom? • What major domestic policy initiatives did Truman undertake? • What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture? O n September 16, 1947, the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, the Freedom Train opened to the public in Philadelphia. A traveling exhibition of 133 historical documents, the train, bedecked in red, white, and blue, soon embarked on a sixteen-month tour that took it to more than 300 American cities. Never before or since have so many cherished pieces of Americana—among them the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address—been assembled in one place. After leaving the train, visitors were encouraged to rededicate themselves to American values by taking the Freedom Pledge and adding their names to a Freedom Scroll. The idea for the Freedom Train, perhaps the most elaborate peacetime patriotic campaign in American history, originated in 1946 with the ★ 905 Department of Justice. President Harry S. Truman endorsed it as a way of contrasting American freedom with “the destruction of liberty by the Hitler tyranny.” Since direct government funding raised fears of propaganda, however, the administration turned the project over to a nonprofit group, the American Heritage Foundation, headed by Winthrop W. Aldrich, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. By any measure, the Freedom Train was an enormous success. It attracted more than 3.5 million visitors, and millions more took part in the civic activities that accompanied its journey, including labor-management forums, educational programs, and patriotic parades. The powerful grassroots response to the train, wrote The New Republic, revealed a popular hunger for “tangible evidence of The cover of a comic book promoting the American freedom.” Behind the scenes, Freedom Train in 1948. The image links the however, the Freedom Train demontrain to Paul Revere’s ride and, more broadly, the revolutionary era. strated that the meaning of freedom remained as controversial as ever. The liberal staff members at the National Archives who proposed the initial list of documents had included the Wagner Act of 1935, which guaranteed workers the right to form unions, as well as President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech of 1941, with its promise to fight “freedom from want.” The more conservative American Heritage Foundation removed these documents. They also deleted from the original list the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which had established the principle of equal civil and political rights regardless of race after the Civil War, and FDR’s 1941 order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which Congress had recently allowed to expire. In the end, nothing on the train referred to organized labor or any twentieth-century social legislation. The only documents relating to blacks were the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, and a 1776 letter by South Carolina patriot Henry Laurens criticizing slavery. Many black Americans initially voiced doubts regarding the exhibit. On the eve of the train’s unveiling, the poet Langston Hughes wondered whether there would be “Jim Crow on the Freedom Train.” “When it stops in M ississippi,” 906 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r Hughes asked, “will it be made plain / Everybody’s got a right to board the Freedom Train?” In fact, with the Truman administration about to make civil rights a major priority, the train’s organizers announced that they would not permit segregated viewing. In an unprecedented move, the American Heritage Foundation canceled visits to Memphis, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama, when local authorities insisted on separating visitors by race. The Freedom Train visited forty- seven other southern cities without incident and was hailed in the black press for breaching, if only temporarily, the walls of segregation. Even as the Freedom Train reflected a new sense of national unease about expressions of racial inequality, its journey also revealed the growing impact of the Cold War. Originally intended to contrast American freedom with Nazi tyranny, the train quickly became caught up in the emerging struggle with communism. In the spring of 1947, a few months before the train was dedicated, President Truman committed the United States to the worldwide containment of Soviet power and inaugurated a program to root out “disloyal” persons from government employment. Soon, Attorney General Tom C. Clark was praising the Freedom Train as a means of preventing “foreign ideologies” from infiltrating the United States and of “aiding the country in its internal war against subversive elements.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation began compiling reports on those who found the train objectionable. The Freedom Train revealed how the Cold War helped to reshape freedom’s meaning, identifying it ever more closely with anticommunism, “free enterprise,” and the defense of the social and economic status quo. • CHRONOLOGY • 1945 Yalta conference 1946 Philippines granted independence 1947 Truman Doctrine Federal Employee Loyalty program Jackie Robinson integrates major league baseball Marshall Plan Taft-Hartley Act Freedom Train exhibition House Un-American Activities Committee investigates Hollywood 1948 UN adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights Truman desegregates military 1948– 1949 Berlin blockade and airlift 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization established Soviet Union tests atomic bomb People’s Republic of China established 1950 McCarthy’s Wheeling, W.V., speech NSC-68 issued McCarran Internal Security Act 1950– 1953 Korean War 1951 Dennis v. United States 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for spying 1954Army-McCarthy hearings 1955 Warsaw Pact organized • TH E UN I TED STATES A N D T H E C O L D WA R ★ 907 • ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR The Two Powers The United States emerged from World War II as by far the world’s greatest power. Although most of the army was quickly demobilized, the country boasted the world’s most powerful navy and air force. The United States accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity. It alone possessed the atomic bomb. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Roosevelt administration was determined to avoid a retreat to isolationism like the one that followed World War I. It believed that the United States could lead the rest of the world to a future of international cooperation, expanding democracy, and ever-increasing living standards. New institutions like the United Nations and World Bank had been created to promote these goals. American leaders also believed that the nation’s security depended on the security of Europe and Asia, and that American prosperity required global economic reconstruction. The only power that in any way could rival the United States was the Soviet Union, whose armies now occupied most of eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany. Its crucial role in defeating Hitler and its claim that communism had wrested a vast backward nation into modernity gave the Soviet Union considerable prestige in Europe and among colonial peoples struggling for independence. Like the United States, the Soviets looked forward to a world order modeled on their own society and values. Having lost more than 20 million dead and suffered vast devastation during the war, however, Stalin’s government was in no position to embark on new military adventures. “Unless they were completely out of their minds,” said American undersecretary of state Dean Acheson, the Russians were hardly likely to go to war with the far more powerful United States. But having done the largest amount of fighting in the defeat of Hitler, the Soviet government remained determined to establish a sphere of influence in eastern Europe, through which Germany had twice invaded Russia in the past thirty years. The Roots of Containment FDR seems to have believed that the United States could maintain friendly relations with the Soviet Union once World War II ended. In retrospect, however, it seems all but inevitable that the two major powers to emerge from the war would come into conflict. Born of a common foe rather than common long-term interests, values, or history, their wartime alliance began to unravel almost from the day that peace was declared. The first confrontation of the Cold War took place in the Middle East. At the end of World War II, Soviet troops had occupied parts of northern Iran, hoping 908 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War? to pressure that country to grant it access to its rich oil fields. Under British and American pressure, however, Stalin quickly withdrew Soviet forces. At the same time, the Soviets installed procommunist governments in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, a step they claimed was no different from American domination of Latin America or Britain’s determination to maintain its own empire. But many Americans became convinced that Stalin was violating the promise of free elections in Poland that had been agreed to at the Yalta conference of 1945. Early in 1946, in his famous Long Telegram from Moscow, American diplomat George Kennan advised the Truman administration that the Soviets could not be dealt with as a normal government. Communist ideology drove them to try to expand their power throughout the world, he claimed, and only the United States had the ability to stop them. While Kennan believed that the Russians could not be dislodged from control of eastern Europe, his telegram laid the foundation for what became known as the policy of “containment,” according to which the United States committed itself to preventing any further expansion of Soviet power. The Iron Curtain Shortly afterward, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, Britain’s former wartime prime minister Winston Churchill declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe, partitioning the free West from the communist East. Churchill’s speech helped to popularize the idea of an impending long-term struggle between the United States and the Soviets. But not until March 1947, in a speech announcing what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, did the president officially embrace the Cold War as the foundation of American foreign policy and describe it as a worldwide struggle over the future of freedom. The Truman Doctrine Harry S. Truman never expected to become president. Until Democratic party leaders chose him to replace Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944, he was an undistinguished senator from Missouri who had risen in politics through his connection with the boss of the Kansas City political machine, Tom Pendergast. When he assumed the presidency after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Truman found himself forced to decide foreign policy debates in which he had previously played virtually no role. Convinced that Stalin could not be trusted and that the United States had a responsibility to provide leadership to a world that he tended to view in stark, black-and-white terms, Truman soon determined to put the policy of containment into effect. The immediate occasion for this epochal decision came early in 1947 when Britain informed the United States that because its economy had O RI G I N S O F T H E C O L D WA R ★ 909 been shattered by the war, it could no longer afford its traditional international role. Britain had no choice but to end military and financial aid to two crucial governments—Greece, a monarchy threatened by a communist-led rebellion, and Turkey, from which the Soviets were demanding joint control of the straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Britain asked the United States to fill the vacuum. The Soviet Union had little to do with the internal problems of Greece and Turkey, where opposition to corrupt, undemocratic regimes was largely homegrown. Neither had held truly free elections. But they occupied strategically important sites at the gateway to southeastern Europe and the o il-rich Middle East. Truman had been told by Senate leader Arthur Vandenberg that the only way a reluctant public and Congress would support aid to these governments was for the president to “scare hell” out of the American people. To rally popular backing, Truman rolled out the heaviest weapon in his rhetorical arsenal— the defense of freedom. As the leader of the “free world,” the United States must now shoulder the responsibility of supporting “freedom-loving peoples” wherever communism threatened them. T wenty-four times in the e ighteen-minute speech, Truman used the words “free” and “freedom.” Building on the wartime division of the globe into free and enslaved worlds, and invoking a far older vision of an American mission to defend liberty against the forces of darkness, the Truman Doctrine created the language through which most Americans came to understand the postwar world. More than any other statement, a prominent senator would write, this speech established “the guiding spirit of American foreign policy.” Truman succeeded in persuading both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to support his policy, beginning a long period of bipartisan support for the containment of communism. As Truman’s speech to Congress suggested, the Cold War was, in part, an ideological conflict. Both sides claimed to be promoting freedom and social justice while defending their own security, and each offered its social system as a model the rest of the world should follow. While his request to Congress was limited to $400 million in military aid to two governments (aid that enabled both Greece and Turkey to defeat their domestic foes), Truman’s rhetoric suggested that the United States had assumed a permanent global responsibility. The speech set a precedent for American assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union. There soon followed the creation of new national security bodies immune from democratic oversight, such as the Atomic Energy Commission, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the last established in 1947 to gather intelligence and conduct secret military operations abroad. 910 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War? The Marshall Plan The language of the Truman Doctrine and the future it sketched of o pen-ended worldwide responsibilities for the United States alarmed many Americans. “Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth-century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco Chronicle. “Are we asking for a third world war?” But the threat of American military action overseas formed only one pillar of containment. Secretary of State George C. Marshall spelled out the other in a speech at Harvard University in June 1947. Marshall pledged the United States to contribute billions of dollars to finance the economic recovery of Europe. Two years after the end of the war, much of the continent still lay in ruins. Food shortages were widespread, and inflation rampant. The economic chaos, exacerbated by the unusually severe winter of 1946–1947, had strengthened the communist parties of France and Italy. American policymakers feared that these countries might fall into the Soviet orbit. The Marshall Plan offered a positive vision to go along with containment. It aimed to combat the idea, widespread since the Great Depression, that capitalism was in decline and communism the wave of the future. It defined the threat to American security not so much as Soviet military power but as economic and political instability, which could be breeding grounds for communism. Avoiding Truman’s language of a world divided between free and unfree blocs, Marshall insisted, “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Freedom meant more than simply anticommunism—it required the emergence of the “political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” In effect, the Marshall Plan envisioned a New Deal for Europe, an extension to that continent of Roosevelt’s wartime Four Freedoms. As a booklet explaining the idea to Europeans put it, the aim was “a higher standard of living for the entire nation; maximum employment for workers and farmers; greater production.” Or, in the words of a slogan used to popularize the Marshall Plan, “Prosperity Makes You Free.” The Marshall Plan proved to be one of the most successful foreign aid programs in history. By 1950, western European production exceeded prewar levels and the region was poised to follow the United States down the road to a mass-consumption society. Since the Soviet Union refused to participate, fearing American control over the economies of eastern Europe, the Marshall Plan further solidified the division of the continent. At the same time, the United States worked out with twenty-three other Western nations the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which proposed to stimulate freer trade among the participants, creating an enormous market for American goods and investment. O RI G I N S O F T H E C O L D WA R ★ 911 The Reconstruction of Japan Under the guidance of General Douglas MacArthur, the “supreme commander” in Japan until 1948, that country adopted a new, democratic constitution and eliminated absentee landlordism so that most tenant farmers became owners of land. Thanks to American insistence, and against the wishes of most Japanese leaders, the new constitution gave women the right to vote for the first time in Japan’s history. (A century after the Seneca Falls convention, women’s suffrage had become an intrinsic part of American understandings of freedom.) Furthermore, Article 9 of the new constitution stated that Japan would renounce forever the policy of war and armed aggression, and would maintain only a modest self-defense force. The United States also oversaw the economic reconstruction of Japan. Initially, the United States proposed to dissolve Japan’s giant industrial corporations, which had contributed so much to the nation’s war effort. But this plan was abandoned in 1948 in favor of an effort to rebuild Japan’s industrial base as a bastion of anticommunist strength in Asia. By the 1950s, thanks to American economic assistance, the adoption of new technologies, and low spending on the military, Japan’s economic recovery was in full swing. The Berlin Blockade and NATO Meanwhile, the Cold War intensified and, despite the Marshall Plan, increasingly took a militaristic turn. At the end of World War II, each of the four victorious powers assumed control of a section of occupied Germany, and of Berlin, located deep in the Soviet zone. In June 1948, the United States, Britain, and France introduced a separate currency in their zones, a prelude to the creation of a new West German government that would be aligned with them in the Cold War. In response, the Soviets cut off road and rail traffic from the American, British, and French zones of occupied Germany to Berlin. An eleven-month airlift followed, with Western planes supplying fuel and food to their zones of the city. When Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949, the Truman administration had won a major victory. Soon, two new nations emerged, East and West Germany, each allied with a side in the Cold War. Berlin itself remained divided. The city’s western part survived as an isolated enclave within East Germany. Not until 1991 would Germany be reunified. Also in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly of the weapon. In the same year, the United States, Canada, and ten western European nations established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), pledging mutual defense against any future Soviet attack. Soon, West Germany became a crucial part of NATO. Many Europeans 912 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War? C O L D WA R E U R O P E , 1 9 5 6 ICELAND ,1 Wall Berlin 96 1 West Berlin East Berlin FINLAND SWEDEN NORWAY A t l ant i c Oc ean PORTUGAL Lisbon Sea Occupation Zones American French British Soviet tic IRELAND North Sea DENMARK l Ba GREAT BRITAIN London NETHERLANDS Berlin POLAND EAST Warsaw BELGIUM Bonn GERMANY WEST Prague Paris GERMANY LUXEMBOURG CZECHOSLOVAKIA FRANCE AUSTRIA Budapest SWITZERLAND HUNGARY ROMANIA SPAIN YUGOSLAVIA ITALY Corsi ca Bucharest Sofia Tirane ALBANIA Sardi n i a Black Ankara TURKEY GREECE Athens Sicily Me d iterr a nea n Se a Crete SYRIA IRAQ CYPRUS LEBANON (Great Britain) ISRAEL JORDAN ALGERIA (France) EGYPT LIBYA 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers ea 0 dS 0 SAUDI ARABIA Re NATO countries Warsaw Pact countries Sea BULGARIA MOROCCO TUNISIA SOVIET UNION The division of Europe between communist and noncommunist nations, solidified by the early 1950s, would last for nearly forty years. feared German rearmament. But France and other victims of Nazi aggression saw NATO as a kind of “double containment,” in which West Germany would serve as a bulwark against the Soviets while integration into the Western alliance tamed and “civilized” German power. The North Atlantic Treaty was the first long-term military alliance between the United States and Europe since the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France during the American Revolution. The Soviets formalized their own eastern European alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. O RI G I N S O F T H E C O L D WA R ★ 913 The Growing Communist Challenge In 1949, communists led by Mao Zedong emerged victorious in the long Chinese civil war—a serious setback for the policy of containment. Assailed by Republicans for having “lost” China (which, of course, the United States never “had” in the first place), the Truman administration refused to recognize the new government—the People’s Republic of China—and blocked it from occupying China’s seat at the United Nations. Until the 1970s, the United States insisted that the ousted regime, which had been forced into exile on the island of Taiwan, remained the legitimate government of China. In the wake of Soviet-American confrontations over southern and eastern Europe and Berlin, the communist victory in China, and Soviet success in developing an atomic bomb, the National Security Council approved a call for a permanent military build-up to enable the United States to pursue a global crusade against communism. Known as NSC-68, this 1950 manifesto described the Cold War as an epic struggle between “the idea of freedom” and the “idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.” At stake in the world conflict, it insisted, was nothing less than “the survival of the free world.” One of the most important policy statements of the early Cold War, NSC-68 helped to spur a dramatic increase in American military spending. The Korean War Initially, American postwar policy focused on Europe. But it was in Asia that the Cold War suddenly turned hot. Occupied by Japan during World War II, Korea had been divided in 1945 into Soviet and American zones. These soon evolved into two governments: communist North Korea, and anticommunist South Korea, undemocratic but aligned with the United States. In June 1950, the North Korean army invaded the south, hoping to reunify the country under communist control. North Korean soldiers soon occupied most of the peninsula. Viewing Korea as a clear test of the policy of containment, the Truman administration persuaded the United Nations Security Council to authorize the use of force to repel the invasion. (The Soviets, who could have vetoed the resolution, were boycotting Security Council meetings to protest the refusal to seat communist China.) American troops did the bulk of the fighting on this first battlefield of the Cold War. In September 1950, General Douglas MacArthur launched a daring counterattack at Inchon, behind North Korean lines. The invading forces retreated northward, and MacArthur’s army soon occupied most of North Korea. Truman now hoped to unite Korea under a pro-American government. But in October 1950, when UN forces neared the Chinese border, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops intervened, driving them back in bloody fighting. 914 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War? T H E K O R E A N WA R , 1 9 5 0 – 1 9 5 3 U.S.S.R. North Korean offensive, June–September 1950 UN offensive, September–November 1950 Communist Chinese counteroffensive, November 1950–January 1951 Farthest UN advance Chongjin November 1950 CHINA NORTH KOREA Hungnam Se a of Japan Wonsan Pyongyang Armistice Line June 27, 1953 Chorwon Kaesong ng n Landi Incho ber 15, 1950 em Sept Yel l ow Sea Kumhwa Panmunjom 38th Parallel Chunchon Seoul Inchon Wonju Osan Taejon SOUTH KOREA it Farthest North Korean advance September 1950 0 0 50 50 100 miles Ko r ea St ra Pusan JAPAN 100 kilometers As this map indicates, when General Douglas MacArthur launched his surprise landing at Inchon, North Korean forces controlled nearly the entire Korean peninsula. MacArthur demanded the right to push north again and possibly even invade China and use nuclear weapons against it. But Truman, fearing an a ll-out war on the Asian mainland, refused. MacArthur did not fully accept the principle of civilian control of the military. When he went public with criticism of the president, Truman removed him from command. The war then settled into a stalemate around the thirty-eighth parallel, the original boundary between the two Koreas. Not until 1953 was an armistice agreed to, essentially restoring the prewar status quo. There has never been a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War. More than 33,000 Americans died in Korea. The Asian death toll reached an estimated 1 million Korean soldiers and 2 million civilians (many of them O RI G I N S O F T H E C O L D WA R ★ 915 victims of starvation after American bombing destroyed irrigation systems essential to rice cultivation), along with hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops. Korea made it clear that the Cold War, which began in Europe, had become a global conflict. Taken together, the events of 1947–1953 showed that the world had moved very far from the hopes for global harmony symbolized by the founding of the United Nations in 1945. No longer did the United States speak of One World (the title of Wendell Willkie’s influential wartime book). Instead, the world had been divided in two. The United States now stood as the undisputed leader of what was increasingly known as the West (although it included Japan, where permanent American military bases were established), or the Free World. NATO was soon followed by SEATO in Southeast Asia and CENTO in the Middle East, forming a web of military alliances that ringed the Soviet Union and China. Cold War Critics In the Soviet Union, Stalin had consolidated a brutal dictatorship that jailed or murdered millions of Soviet citizens. With its one-party rule, stringent state control of the arts and intellectual life, and government- controlled economy, the Soviet Union presented a stark opposite of democracy and “free enterprise.” As a number of contemporary critics, few of them sympathetic to Soviet communism, pointed out, however, casting the Cold War in terms of a worldwide battle between freedom and slavery had unfortunate consequences. George Kennan, whose Long Telegram had inspired the policy of containment, observed that such language made it impossible to view international crises on a case-by-case basis, or to determine which genuinely involved either freedom or American interests. In a penetrating critique of Truman’s policies, Walter Lippmann, one of the nation’s most prominent journalists, objected to turning foreign policy into an “ideological crusade.” To view every challenge to the status quo as part of a contest with the Soviet Union, Lippmann correctly predicted, would require the United States to recruit and subsidize an “array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets.” It would have to intervene continuously in the affairs of nations whose political problems did not arise from Moscow and could not be easily understood in terms of the battle between freedom and slavery. World War II, he went on, had shaken the foundations of European empires. In the tide of revolutionary nationalism now sweeping the world, communists were certain to play an important role. It would be a serious mistake, Lippmann warned, for the United States to align itself against the movement for colonial independence in the name of anticommunism. 916 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r How did the Cold War reshape ideas of American freedom? Imperialism and Decolonization World War II had increased awareness in the United States of the problem of imperialism and had led many African-Americans to identify their own struggle for equality with the strivings of non-white colonial peoples overseas. Many movements for colonial independence borrowed the language of the American Declaration of Independence in demanding the right to s elf-government. Liberal Democrats and black leaders urged the Truman administration to take the lead in promoting worldwide decolonization, insisting that a Free World worthy of the name should not include colonies and empires. In 1946, the United States granted independence to the Philippines, a move hailed by nationalist movements in other colonies. But as the Cold War developed, the United States backed away from pressuring its European allies to move toward granting s elf- government to colonies like French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and British possessions like the Gold Coast and Nigeria in Africa and Malaya in Asia. Even after granting independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, Britain was determined to retain much of its empire. In practice, geopolitical and economic interests shaped American foreign policy as powerfully as the idea of freedom. But American policymakers used the language of a crusade for freedom to justify actions around the world that had little to do with freedom by almost any definition. No matter how repressive to its own people, if a nation joined the worldwide anticommunist alliance led by the United States, it was counted as a member of the Free World. The Republic of South Africa, for example, was considered a part of the Free World even though its white minority had deprived the black population of nearly all their rights. Was there not some way, one critic asked, that the United States could accept “the aid of tyrants” on practical grounds “without corrupting our speeches by identifying tyranny with freedom”? THE COLD WAR AND THE IDEA OF FREEDOM Among other things, the Cold War was an ideological struggle, a battle, in a popular phrase of the 1950s, for the “hearts and minds” of people throughout the world. Like other wars, it required popular mobilization, in which the idea of freedom played a central role. During the 1950s, freedom became an inescapable theme of academic research, popular journalism, mass culture, and official pronouncements. Henry Luce, who had popularized the idea of an American Century, explained that “freedom” was the “one word out of the whole human vocabulary” through which Time magazine could best explain America to the TH E CO LD WA R A N D TH E I D E A O F F R E E D O M ★ 917 rest of the world. In many ways, the Cold War established the framework for the discussion of freedom. The Cultural Cold War One of the more unusual Cold War battlefields involved American history and culture. Many scholars read the American Creed of pluralism, tolerance, and equality back into the past as a timeless definition of Americanism, ignoring the powerful ethnic and racial strains with which it had always coexisted. Under the code name “Militant Liberty,” national security agencies encouraged Hollywood to produce anticommunist movies, such as The Red Menace (1949) and I Married a Communist (1950), and urged that film scripts be changed to remove references to less-than-praiseworthy aspects of American history, such as Indian removal and racial discrimination. The Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department emerged as unlikely patrons of the arts. As noted in Chapter 21, the federal government had openly financed all sorts of artistic works during the 1930s. But Cold War funding for the arts remained top-secret—in part because Congress proved reluctant to spend money for this purpose, in part because Americans charged communist governments with imposing artistic conformity. In an effort to influence public opinion abroad, the Soviet Union sponsored tours of its world-famous ballet companies, folk dance troupes, and symphony orchestras. To counteract the widespread European view of the United States as a cultural backwater, the CIA secretly funded an array of overseas publications, conferences, publishing houses, concerts, and art exhibits. And to try to improve the international image of American race relations, the government sent jazz musicians and other black performers abroad, especially to Africa and Asia. Works produced by artists who considered themselves thoroughly nonpolitical became weapons in the cultural Cold War. The CIA promoted the so-called New York school of painters, led by Jackson Pollock. For Pollock, the essence of art lay in the process of creation, not the final product. His “action” paintings, made by spontaneously dripping and pouring paint over large canvases, produced works of vivid color and energy but without any recognizable subject matter. Many members of Congress much preferred Norman Rockwell’s readily understandable illustrations of s mall-town life to Pollock’s “abstract expressionism.” Some called Pollock’s works u n-American and wondered aloud if they were part of a communist plot. In 1946, for example, the State Department assembled a stylistically diverse exhibition of contemporary American paintings that it displayed in Europe and Latin America to demonstrate “the freedom of expression enjoyed by artists in America.” But criticism emerged in Congress. Representative Fred Busbey of Illinois said the exhibit gave the impression that “the American people are despondent, broke down 918 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r How did the Cold War reshape ideas of American freedom? or of hideous shape.” The State Department abandoned the project and sold the works at auction. In 2013, for the first time in half a century, they were exhibited, at Indiana University, with the overall title Art Interrupted. The CIA, however, funded the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which championed the New York school, and helped arrange for exhibitions overseas. It hoped to persuade Europeans not only that these paintings demonstrated that the United States represented artistic leadership as well as military power, but that such art embodied the free, individual expression denied to artists in communist countries. Pollock’s paintings, John Cage’s musical compositions, which incorporated chance sounds rather than a fixed score, and the “graceful freedom” of George Balanchine’s ballet choreography were all described as artistic reflections of the essence of American life. Freedom and Totalitarianism Along with freedom, the Cold War’s other great mobilizing concept was totalitarianism. The term originated in Europe between the world wars to describe fascist Italy and Nazi A poster for The Red Menace, one of numerous Germany—aggressive, ideologically anticommunist films produced by Hollywood driven states that sought to subdue all during the 1950s. of civil society, including churches, unions, and other voluntary associations, to their control. Such states, according to the theory of totalitarianism, left no room for individual rights or alternative values and therefore could never change from within. By 1950, the year the McCarran Internal Security Act barred “totalitarians” from entering the United TH E CO LD WA R A N D TH E I D E A O F F R E E D O M ★ 919 States, the term had become a shorthand way of describing those on the other side in the Cold War. As the eventual collapse of communist governments in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would demonstrate, the idea of totalitarianism greatly exaggerated the totality of government control of private life and thought in these countries. But its widespread use reinforced the view that the greatest danger to freedom lay in an overly powerful government. Just as the conflict over slavery redefined American freedom in the nineteenth century and the confrontation with the Nazis shaped understandings of freedom during World War II, the Cold War reshaped them once again. Russia had already conquered America, the poet Archibald MacLeish complained in 1949, since politics was conducted “under a kind of upside-down Russian veto.” Whatever Moscow stood for was by definition the opposite of freedom, including anything to which the word “socialized” could be attached. In the largest public relations campaign in American history, the American Medical Association raised the specter of “socialized medicine” to discredit and defeat Truman’s proposal for national health insurance. The r eal-estate industry likewise mobilized against public housing, terming it “socialized housing,” similar to policies undertaken by Moscow. The Rise of Human Rights The Cold War also affected the emerging concept of human rights. The atrocities committed during World War II, as well as the global language of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, forcefully raised the issue of human rights in the postwar world. After the war, the victorious Allies put numerous German officials on trial before special courts at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. For the first time, individuals were held directly accountable to the international community for violations of human rights. The trials resulted in prison terms for many Nazi officials and the execution of ten leaders. The United Nations Charter includes strong language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religion. In 1948, the UN General Assembly approved a far more sweeping document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. It identified a broad range of rights to be enjoyed by people everywhere, including freedom of speech, religious toleration, and protection against arbitrary government, as well as social and economic entitlements like the right to an adequate standard of living and access to housing, education, and medical care. The document had no enforcement mechanism. Some considered it an exercise in empty rhetoric. But the core p rinciple—that a nation’s treatment of its own citizens should be subject to outside evaluation—slowly became part of the language in which freedom was discussed. 920 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r How did the Cold War reshape ideas of American freedom? Ambiguities of Human Rights The American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century had introduced into international relations the idea of basic rights belonging to all persons simply because they are human. In a sense, this was the origin of the idea of “human rights”—principles so fundamental that no government has a right to violate them. The antislavery movement had turned this idea into a powerful weapon against the legitimacy of slavery. Yet the debates over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights revealed the tensions inherent in the idea, tensions that persist to the present day. To what extent do human rights supersede national sovereignty? Who has the authority to enforce human rights that a government is violating? The United Nations? Regional bodies like the Organization of American States and the European Union? A single country (as the United States would claim to be doing in the Iraq War that began in 2003)? The Covenant of the League of Nations—the predecessor of the United Nations created after World War I—had contained a clause allowing the league to intervene when a government violated the rights of its own citizens. One reason for the lack of an enforcement mechanism in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was that both the United States and the Soviet Union refused to accept outside interference in their internal affairs. John Foster Dulles, an American delegate to the conference that created the UN, opposed any statement affirming human rights out of fear that it would lead to an international investigation of “the Negro question in this country.” In 1947, the NAACP did file a petition with the United Nations asking it to investigate racism in the United States as a violation of human rights. Conditions in states like Mississippi should be of concern to all mankind, it argued, because if democracy failed to function in “the leading democracy in the world,” the prospects for democracy were weakened everywhere. But the UN decided that it lacked jurisdiction. Nonetheless, since the end of World War II, the enjoyment of human rights has increasingly taken its place in definitions of freedom across the globe, especially where such rights are flagrantly violated. After the Cold War ended, the idea of human rights would play an increasingly prominent role in world affairs. But during the 1950s, Cold War imperatives shaped the concept. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could resist emphasizing certain provisions of the Universal Declaration while ignoring others. The Soviets claimed to provide all citizens with social and economic rights, but violated democratic rights and civil liberties. Many Americans condemned the nonpolitical rights as a step toward socialism. Eleanor Roosevelt saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an integrated body of principles, a combination of traditional civil and political liberties with the social conditions of freedom outlined in her husband’s Economic Bill of Rights of 1944. But to make it easier for member states to ratify the TH E CO LD WA R A N D TH E I D E A O F F R E E D O M ★ 921 document, the UN divided it into two “covenants”—Civil and Political Rights, and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. It took until 1992 for the U.S. Congress to ratify the first. It has never approved the second. THE TRUMAN PRESIDENCY The Fair Deal With the end of World War II, President Truman’s first domestic task was to preside over the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. More than 12 million men remained in uniform in August 1945. Most wanted nothing more than to return home to their families. Demobilization proceeded at a rapid pace. Within a year, the armed forces had been reduced to 3 million. Some returning soldiers found the adjustment to civilian life difficult. The divorce rate in 1945 rose to double its prewar level. Others took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights (discussed in the previous chapter) to obtain home mortgages, set up small businesses, and embark on college educations. The majority of returning soldiers entered the labor f orce—one reason why more than 2 million women workers lost their jobs. The government abolished wartime agencies that regulated industrial production and labor relations, and it dismantled wartime price controls, leading to a sharp rise in prices. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, President Truman, backed by party liberals and organized labor, moved to revive the stalled momentum of the New Deal. Truman’s program, which he announced in September 1945 and would later call the Fair Deal, focused on improving the social safety net and raising the standard of living of ordinary Americans. He called on Congress to increase the minimum wage, enact a program of national health insurance, and expand public housing, Social Security, and aid to education. Truman, complained one Republican leader, was “out–New Dealing the New Deal.” The Postwar Strike Wave In 1946, a new wave of labor militancy swept the country. The AFL and CIO launched Operation Dixie, a campaign to bring unionization to the South and, by so doing, shatter the hold of anti-labor conservatives on the region’s politics. More than 200 labor organizers entered the region, seeking support especially in the southern textile industry, the steel industry in the Birmingham region, and agriculture. With war production at an end, overtime work diminished even as inflation soared following the removal of price controls. The resulting drop in workers’ real income sparked the largest strike wave in American history. Nearly 5 million workers—including those in the steel, auto, coal, and 922 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What major domestic policy initiatives did Truman undertake? other key industries—walked off their jobs, demanding wage increases. The strike of 750,000 steelworkers represented the largest single walkout in American history to that date. Even Hollywood studios shut down because of a strike of actors and other employees of the movie industry that lasted for the better part of a year. One historian calls this period “the closest thing to a national general strike in industry in the twentieth century.” President Truman feared the strikes would seriously disrupt the economy. When railroad workers stopped work and set up picket lines, the infuriated president prepared a speech in which he threatened to draft them all into the army and “hang a few traitors”—language toned down by his advisers. The walkout soon ended, as did a coal strike after the Truman administration secured a court order requiring the miners to return to work. To resolve other strikes, Truman appointed federal “fact-finding boards,” which generally recommended wage increases, although not enough to restore workers’ purchasing power to wartime levels. The Republican Resurgence In the congressional elections of 1946, large numbers of m iddle-class voters, alarmed by the labor turmoil, voted Republican. Many workers, disappointed by Truman’s policies, stayed at home. This was a lethal combination for the Democratic Party. For the first time since the 1920s, Republicans swept to control of both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, in the face of vigorous opposition from southern employers and public officials and the reluctance of many white workers to join interracial labor unions, Operation Dixie failed to unionize the South or dent the political control of conservative Democrats in the region. The election of 1946 ensured that a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats would continue to dominate Congress. Congress turned aside Truman’s Fair Deal program. It enacted tax cuts for wealthy Americans and, over the president’s veto, in 1947 passed the Taft- Hartley Act, which sought to reverse some of the gains made by organized labor in the past decade. The measure authorized the president to suspend strikes by ordering an e ighty-day “cooling-off period,” and it banned sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts (labor actions directed not at an employer but at those who did business with him). It outlawed the closed shop, which required a worker to be a union member when taking up a job, and authorized states to pass “right-to-work” laws, prohibiting other forms of compulsory union membership. It also forced union officials to swear that they were not communists. While hardly a “slave-labor bill,” as the AFL and CIO called it, the Taft-Hartley Act made it considerably more difficult to bring unorganized workers into unions. Over time, as population and capital investment shifted to states with TH E TR U MA N P R E S I D E N C Y ★ 923 “right-to-work” laws like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, Taft-Hartley contributed to the decline of organized labor’s share of the nation’s workforce. Postwar Civil Rights During his first term, Truman reached out in unprecedented ways to the nation’s black community. The war, as noted in the previous chapter, had inspired a new black militancy and led many whites to reject American racial practices as reminiscent of Hitler’s theory of a master race. In the years immediately following World War II, the status of black Americans enjoyed a prominence in national affairs unmatched since Reconstruction. Between 1945 and 1951, eleven states from New York to New Mexico established fair employment practices commissions, and numerous cities passed laws against discrimination in access to jobs and public accommodations. (Some of these measures addressed other racial groups besides blacks: for example, California in 1947 repealed its laws permitting local school districts to provide segregated education for children of Chinese descent and those barring aliens from owning land.) A broad civil rights coalition involving labor, religious groups, and black organizations supported these measures. The NAACP, its ranks swollen during the war, launched a voter registration campaign in the South. By 1952, 20 percent of black southerners were registered to vote, nearly a seven-fold increase since 1940. (Most of the gains took place in the Upper South—in Alabama and Mississippi, the heartland of white supremacy, the numbers barely budged.) Law enforcement agencies finally took the crime of lynching seriously. In 1952, for the first time since record keeping began seventy years earlier, no lynchings took place in the United States. In 1946, the Superman radio show devoted several episodes to the man of steel fighting the Ku Klux Klan, a sign of changing race relations in the wake of World War II. In another indication that race relations were in flux, the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 challenged the long-standing exclusion of black players from major league baseball by adding Jackie Robinson to their team. Robinson, who possessed both remarkable athletic ability and a passion for equality, had been tried and acquitted for insubordination in 1944 when he refused to move to the back of a bus at Fort Hood, Texas, while serving in the army. But he promised Dodger owner Branch Rickey that he would not retaliate when subjected to racist taunts by opposing fans and players. His dignity in the face of constant verbal abuse won Robinson nationwide respect, and his baseball prowess earned him the Rookie of the Year award. His success opened the door to the integration of baseball and led to the demise of the Negro Leagues, to which black players had previously been confined. 924 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What major domestic policy initiatives did Truman undertake? To Secure These Rights In October 1947, a Commission on Civil Rights appointed by the president issued To Secure These Rights, one of the most devastating indictments ever published of racial inequality in America. It called on the federal government to assume the responsibility for abolishing segregation and ensuring equal treatment in housing, employment, education, and the criminal justice system. Truman hailed the report as “an American charter of human freedom.” The impact of America’s race Part of a series of giant murals painted for the system on the nation’s ability to conlobby of the Rincon Center (formerly a post duct the Cold War was not far from his office, now a shopping mall in San Francisco), mind. Truman noted that if the United this work by the artist Anton Refregier links the States were to offer the “peoples of the Four Freedoms of World War II to a multicultural world” a “choice of freedom or enslave- vision of American society. (In Norman Rockwell’s celebrated paintings, shown in Chapter 22, ment,” it must “correct the remain- all the figures depicted are white.) ing imperfections in our practice of democracy.” In February 1948, Truman presented an ambitious civil rights program to Congress, calling for a permanent federal civil rights commission, national laws against lynching and the poll tax, and action to ensure equal access to jobs and education. Congress, as Truman anticipated, approved none of his proposals. But in July 1948, just as the presidential campaign was getting under way, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces. The armed services became the first large institution in American life to promote racial integration actively and to attempt to root out long-standing racist practices. The Korean War would be the first American conflict fought by an integrated army since the War of Independence. Truman genuinely despised racial discrimination. But his focus on civil rights also formed part of a strategy to win reelection by reinvigorating and expanding the political coalition Roosevelt had created. With calls for federal health insurance, the repeal of the T aft-Hartley Act, and aid to public education, the Democratic platform of 1948 was the most progressive in the party’s history. Led by Hubert Humphrey, the young mayor of Minneapolis, party liberals overcame southern resistance and added a strong civil rights plank to the platform. TH E TR U MA N P R E S I D E N C Y ★ 925 The Dixiecrat and Wallace Revolts “I say the time has come,” Humphrey told the Democratic national convention, “to walk out of the shadow of states’ rights and into the sunlight of human rights.” Whereupon numerous southern delegates—dubbed Dixiecrats by the p ress—walked out of the gathering. They soon formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party and nominated for president Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Although his platform called for the “complete segregation of the races” and his campaign drew most of its support from those alarmed by Truman’s civil rights initiatives, Thurmond denied charges of racism. The real issue of the election, Thurmond insisted, was freedom—the States’ Rights Democratic Party, he declared, stood for “individual liberty and freedom, the right of people to govern themselves.” Truman’s plans for extending federal power into the South to enforce civil rights, Thurmond charged, would “convert America into a Hitler state.” Also in 1948, a group of l eft-wing critics of Truman’s foreign policy formed the Progressive Party and nominated former vice president Henry A. Wallace for president. Wallace advocated an expansion of social welfare programs at home and denounced racial segregation even more vigorously than Truman. When he campaigned in the South, angry white crowds attacked him. But his real difference with the president concerned the Cold War. Wallace called for international control of nuclear weapons and a renewed effort to develop a relationship with the Soviet Union based on economic cooperation rather than military confrontation. He announced his willingness to accept support from all Americans who agreed with him, including socialists and communists. The influence of the now m uch-reduced Communist Party in Wallace’s campaign led to an exodus of New Deal liberals and severe attacks on his candidacy. A vote for Wallace, Truman declared, was in effect a vote for Stalin. The 1948 Campaign Wallace threatened to draw votes from Truman on the left, and Thurmond to undermine the president’s support in the South, where whites had voted solidly for the Democrats throughout the twentieth century. But Truman’s main opponent, fortunately for the president, was the colorless Republican Thomas A. Dewey. Certain of victory and an ineffective speaker and campaigner, Dewey seemed unwilling to commit himself on controversial issues. His speeches, wrote one hostile newspaper, amounted to nothing more than clichés: “Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.” Truman, by contrast, ran an aggressive campaign. He crisscrossed the country by train, delivering fiery 926 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture? attacks on the Republican-controlled “do-nothing Congress.” Truman revived New Deal rhetoric denouncing Wall Street and charged his opponent with threatening to undermine Social Security and other New Deal benefits. “Don’t let them take it away,” he repeated over and over. The four-way 1948 campaign was the last before television put a premium on brief political advertisements and entertaining slogans rather than substantive debate, and the last in which a full spectrum of ideologies was presented to the American public. Virtually every p ublic-opinion poll and newspaper report predicted a Dewey victory. Truman’s success—by 303 to 189 electoral votes—represented one of the greatest upsets in American political history. For the first time since 1868, blacks (in the North, where they enjoyed the right to vote) played a decisive role in the outcome. Thurmond carried four Deep South states, demonstrating that the race issue, couched in terms of individual freedom, had the potential of leading traditionally Democratic white voters to desert their party. In retrospect, the States’ Rights campaign offered a preview of the political transformation that by the end of the twentieth century would leave every southern state in the Republican column. As for Wallace, he suffered the humiliation of polling fewer popular votes (1.16 million) than Thurmond (1.17 million). His crushing defeat inaugurated an era in which public criticism of the foundations of American foreign policy became all but impossible. THE ANTICOMMUNIST CRUSADE For nearly half a century, the Cold War profoundly affected American life. There would be no return to “normalcy” as after World War I. The military- industrial establishment created during World War II would be permanent, not temporary. The United States retained a large and active federal government and poured money into weapons development and overseas bases. National security became the stated reason for a host of government projects, including aid to higher education and the building of a new national highway system (justified by the need to speed the evacuation of major cities in the event of nuclear war). The Cold War encouraged a culture of secrecy and dishonesty. Not until decades later was it revealed that during the 1950s and 1960s both the Soviet and American governments conducted experiments in which unwitting soldiers were exposed to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. American nuclear tests, conducted on Pacific islands and in Nevada, exposed thousands of civilians to radiation that caused cancer and birth defects. Cold War military spending helped to fuel economic growth and support scientific research that not only perfected weaponry but also led to improved TH E A N TI COMMU N I S T C R U S A D E ★ 927 A postcard promoting tourism to Las Vegas highlights as one attraction the city’s proximity to a nuclear test site. Witnessing nearby atomic explosions became a popular pastime in the city. The government failed to issue warnings of the dangers of nuclear fallout, and only years later did it admit that many onlookers had contracted diseases from radiation. aircraft, computers, medicines, and other products with a large impact on civilian life. Since much of this research took place at universities, the Cold War promoted the rapid expansion of American higher education. The Cold War reshaped immigration policy, with refugees from communism being allowed to enter the United States regardless of n ational-origin quotas. The international embarrassment caused by American racial policies contributed to the dismantling of segregation. And like other wars, the Cold War encouraged the drawing of a sharp line between patriotic Americans and those accused of being disloyal. C ontainment—not only of communism but of unorthodox opinions of all k inds—took place at home as well as abroad. At precisely the moment when the United States celebrated freedom as the foundation of American life, the right to dissent came under attack. Loyalty and Disloyalty Dividing the world between liberty and slavery automatically made those who could be linked to communism enemies of freedom. Although the assault on civil liberties came to be known as McCarthyism, it began before Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin burst onto the national scene in 1950. In 928 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture? 1947, less than two weeks after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the president established a loyalty review system that required government employees to demonstrate their patriotism without being allowed to confront accusers or, in some cases, knowing the charges against them. Along with persons suspected of disloyalty, the new national security system also targeted homosexuals who worked for the g overnment. They were deemed particularly susceptible to blackmail by Soviet agents as well as supposedly lacking in the manly qualities needed to maintain the country’s resolve in the fight against communism. Ironically, the government conducted an a nti-gay campaign at the very time that gay men enjoyed a powerful presence in realms of culture and commercial life being promoted as expressions of American f reedom—modern art and ballet, fashion, and advertising. The loyalty program failed to uncover any cases of espionage. But the federal government dismissed several hundred persons from their jobs, and thousands resigned rather than submit to investigation. Also in 1947, the House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a series of hearings about communist influence in Hollywood. Calling well-known screenwriters, directors, and actors to appear before the committee ensured itself a wave of national publicity, which its members relished. Celebrities like producer Walt Disney and actors Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan testified that the movie industry harbored numerous communists. But ten “unfriendly witnesses” refused to answer the committee’s questions about their political beliefs or to “name names” (identify individual communists) on the grounds that the hearings violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and political association. The committee charged the Hollywood Ten, who included the prominent screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo, with contempt of Congress, and they served jail terms of six months to a year. Hollywood studios blacklisted them (denied them employment), along with more than 200 others who were accused of communist sympathies or who refused to name names. The Spy Trials A series of highly publicized legal cases followed, which fueled the growing anticommunist hysteria. Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine, testified before HUAC that during the 1930s, Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, had given him secret government documents to pass to agents of the Soviet Union. Hiss vehemently denied the charge, but a jury convicted him of perjury and he served five years in prison. A young congressman from California and a member of HUAC, Richard Nixon, achieved national prominence because of his dogged pursuit of Hiss. In another celebrated case, the Truman administration put the leaders of the Communist Party on trial TH E A N TI COMMU N I S T C R U S A D E ★ 929 for advocating the overthrow of the government. In 1951, eleven of them were sentenced to five years in prison. The most sensational trial involved Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a w orking- class Jewish communist couple from New York City (quite different from Hiss, a member of the eastern Protestant “establishment”). In 1951, a jury convicted the Rosenbergs of conspiracy to pass secrets concerning the atomic bomb to Soviet agents during World War II (when the Soviets were American allies). Their chief accuser was David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, who had worked at the Los Alamos nuclear research center. The case against Julius Rosenberg rested on highly secret documents that could not be revealed in court. (When they were released many years later, the scientific information they contained seemed too crude to justify the government’s charge that Julius had passed along the “secret of the atomic bomb,” although he may have helped the Soviets speed up their atomic program.) The government had almost no evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, and Greenglass later admitted that he had lied in some of his testimony about her. Indeed, prosecutors seem to have indicted her in the hope of pressuring Julius to confess and implicate others. But in the atmosphere of hysteria, their conviction was certain. Even though they had been convicted of conspiracy, a far weaker charge than spying or treason, Judge Irving Kaufman called their crime “worse than murder.” They had helped, he declared, to “cause” the Korean War. Despite an international outcry, the death sentence was carried out in 1953. Controversy still surrounds the degree of guilt of both Hiss and the Rosenbergs, although almost no one today defends the Rosenbergs’ execution. But these trials powerfully reinforced the idea that an army of Soviet spies was at work in the United States. McCarthy and McCarthyism In this atmosphere, a l ittle-known senator from Wisconsin suddenly emerged as the chief national pursuer of subversives and gave a new name to the anticommunist crusade. Joseph R. McCarthy had won election to the Senate in 1946, partly on the basis of a fictional war record (he falsely claimed to have flown combat missions in the Pacific). In a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department. The charge was preposterous, the numbers constantly changed, and McCarthy never identified a single person guilty of genuine disloyalty. But with a genius for self-promotion, McCarthy used the Senate subcommittee he chaired to hold hearings and level wild charges against numerous individuals as well as the Defense Department, the Voice of America, and other government agencies. Although many Republicans initially supported his rampage as a weapon against the Truman administration, McCarthy became 930 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture? an embarrassment to the party after the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in 1952. But McCarthy did not halt his campaign. He even questioned Eisenhower’s anticommunism. Few political figures had the courage to speak up against McCarthy’s crusade. One who did was Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the Senate’s only woman member. On June 1, 1950, soon after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, Smith addressed the Senate with what she called a “declaration of conscience.” She did not name McCarthy, but few could mistake the target of her condemnation of a “campaign of hate and character assassination.” Most of her colleagues, however, remained silent. McCarthy’s downfall came in 1954, when a Senate committee investigated his charges that the army had harbored and “coddled” communists. The nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings revealed McCarthy as a bully who browbeat witnesses and made sweeping accusations with no basis in fact. The dramatic high point came when McCarthy attacked the loyalty of a young attorney in the firm of Joseph Welch, the army’s chief lawyer. “Let us not assassinate this lad further,” Welch pleaded. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?” After the hearings ended, the Republican-controlled Senate voted to “condemn” McCarthy for his behavior. He died three years later. But the word “McCarthyism” had entered the political vocabulary, a shorthand for character assassination, guilt by association, and abuse of power in the name of anticommunism. An Atmosphere of Fear By the early 1950s, the anticommunist crusade had created a pervasive atmosphere of fear. One commentator described Washington, D.C., as a city rife with “spying, suspicion, [and] defamation by rumor,” with “democratic freedoms” at risk as power slipped into the hands of those “whose values are the values of dictatorship and whose methods are the methods of the police state.” But anticommunism was as much a local as a national phenomenon. States created their own committees, modeled on HUAC, that investigated suspected communists and other dissenters. States and localities required loyalty oaths of teachers, pharmacists, and members of other professions, and they banned communists from fishing, holding a driver’s license, and, in Indiana, working as a professional wrestler. Private organizations like the American Legion, National Association of Manufacturers, and Daughters of the American Revolution also persecuted individuals for their beliefs. The Better America League of southern California gathered the names of nearly 2 million alleged subversives in the region. Previous membership in organizations with communist influence or even participation in campaigns in which communists had taken part, such as the TH E A N TI COMMU N I S T C R U S A D E ★ 931 defense of the government of Spain during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, suddenly took on sinister implications. Throughout the country in the late 1940s and 1950s, those who failed to testify about their past and present political beliefs and to inform on possible communists frequently lost their jobs. Local anticommunist groups forced public libraries to remove from their shelves “un-American” books like the tales of Robin Hood, who took from the rich to give to the poor. Universities refused to allow left-wing speakers to appear on campus and fired teachers who refused to sign loyalty oaths or to “Fire!” Cartoonist Herbert Block, known as testify against others. “Herblock,” offered this comment in 1949 on As during World War I, the courts the danger to American freedom posed by the did nothing to halt the political represanticommunist crusade. sion, demonstrating once again James Madison’s warning that popular hysteria could override “parchment barriers” like the Bill of Rights that sought to prevent infringements on freedom. In 1951, in Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the jailing of Communist Party leaders even though the charges concerned their beliefs, not any actions they had taken. Even many liberals retreated from the idea that freedom of expression was a birthright of all Americans. The American Civil Liberties Union condemned McCarthy’s tactics but refused to defend the indicted Communist Party leaders. The Uses of Anticommunism There undoubtedly were Soviet spies in the United States. Yet the tiny Communist Party hardly posed a threat to American security. And the vast majority of those jailed or deprived of their livelihoods during the McCarthy era were guilty of nothing more than holding unpopular beliefs and engaging in lawful political activities. Anticommunism had many faces and purposes. A popular mass movement, it grew especially strong among ethnic groups like P olish-Americans, with roots in eastern European countries now dominated by the Soviet Union, and among American Catholics in general, who resented and feared communists’ hostility to religion. Government agencies like the Federal Bureau of 932 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture? Investigation (FBI) used anticommunism to expand their power. Under director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI developed files on thousands of American citizens, including political dissenters, homosexuals, and others, most of whom had no connection to communism. Anticommunism also served as a weapon wielded by individuals and groups in battles unrelated to defending the United States against subversion. McCarthy and his Republican followers often seemed to target not so much Stalin as the legacy of Roosevelt and the New Deal. For many Democrats, aggressive anticommunism became a form of self-defense against Republican charges of disloyalty and a weapon in a struggle for the party’s future. The campaign against subversion redrew the boundaries of acceptable Democratic liberalism to exclude both communists and those willing to cooperate with them as in the days of the Popular Front. Indeed, “sympathetic association” with communists—past or present—became grounds for dismissal from one’s job under the government’s loyalty program. As the historian Henry Steele Commager argued in a 1947 magazine article, the anticommunist crusade promoted a new definition of loyalty—conformity. Anything other than “uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is,” wrote Commager, could now be labeled unpatriotic. For business, anticommunism became part of a campaign to identify government intervention in the economy with socialism. White supremacists employed anticommunism against black civil rights, business used it against unions, and upholders of sexual morality and traditional gender roles raised the cry of subversion against feminism and homosexuality, both supposedly responsible for eroding the country’s fighting spirit. Anticommunist Politics At its height, from the late 1940s to around 1960, the anticommunist crusade powerfully structured American politics and culture. Especially after their unexpected defeat in 1948, Republicans in Congress used a drumbeat of charges of subversion to block Truman’s political program. The most important actions of Congress were ones the president opposed. After launching the government’s loyalty program in 1947, Truman had become increasingly alarmed at the excesses of the anticommunist crusade. He vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Bill of 1950, which required “subversive” groups to register with the government, allowed the denial of passports to their members, and authorized their deportation or detention on presidential order. But Congress quickly gave the measure the two-thirds majority necessary for it to become law. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, the first major piece of immigration legislation since 1924, also passed over the president’s veto. Truman had appointed TH E A N TI COMMU N I S T C R U S A D E ★ 933 a Commission on Immigration, whose report, Whom Shall We Welcome?, called for replacing the quotas based on national origins with a more flexible system taking into account family reunion, labor needs, and political asylum. But the McCarran-Walter Act kept the quotas in place. It also authorized the deportation of immigrants identified as communists, even if they had become citizens. But the renewed fear of aliens sparked by the anticommunist crusade went far beyond communists. In 1954, the federal government launched Operation Wetback, which employed the military to invade M exican-American neighborhoods and round up and deport illegal aliens. Within a year, some 1 million Mexicans had been deported. Truman did secure passage of a 1950 law that added previously excluded self-employed and domestic workers to Social Security. Otherwise, however, the idea of expanding the New Deal welfare state faded. In its place, private welfare arrangements proliferated. The labor contracts of unionized workers established health insurance plans, automatic cost of living wage increases, paid vacations, and pension plans that supplemented Social Security. Western European governments provided these benefits to all citizens. In the United States, union members in major industries enjoyed them, but not the nonunionized majority of the population, a situation that created increasing inequality among laboring Americans. The Cold War and Organized Labor Every political and social organization had to cooperate with the anticommunist crusade or face destruction, a wrenching experience for movements like labor and civil rights, in which communists had been some of the most militant organizers. After the passage of the T aft-Hartley Act of 1947, which withdrew bargaining rights and legal protection from unions whose leaders failed to swear that they were not communists, the CIO expelled numerous left-wing officials and eleven communist-led unions, representing nearly 1 million workers. Organized labor emerged as a major supporter of the foreign policy of the Cold War. Internal battles over the role of communists and their allies led to the purging of some of the most militant union leaders, often the ones most committed to advancing equal rights to women and racial minorities in the workplace. Cold War Civil Rights The civil rights movement also underwent a transformation. At first, mainstream black organizations like the NAACP and Urban League protested the Truman administration’s loyalty program. They wondered aloud why the program and congressional committees defined communism as “un-American,” 934 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture? but not racism. Anticommunist investigators often cited attendance at interracial gatherings as evidence of disloyalty. But while a few prominent black leaders, notably the singer and actor Paul Robeson and the veteran crusader for equality W. E. B. Du Bois, became outspoken critics of the Cold War, most felt they had no choice but to go along. The NAACP purged communists from local branches. When the government deprived Robeson of his passport and indicted Du Bois for failing to register as an agent of the Soviet Union, few prominent Americans, white or black, protested. (The charge against Du Bois was so absurd that even at the height of McCarthyism, the judge dismissed it.) The Cold War caused a shift in thinking and tactics among civil rights groups. Organizations like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, in which communists and noncommunists had cooperated in linking racial equality with labor organizing and economic reform, had been crucial to the struggles of the 1930s and war years. Their demise left a gaping hole that the NAACP, with its narrowly legalistic strategy, could not fill. Black organizations embraced the language of the Cold War and used it for their own purposes. They insisted that by damaging the American image abroad, racial inequality played into the Russians’ hands. Thus, they helped to cement Cold War ideology as the foundation of the political culture, while complicating the idea of American freedom. President Truman, as noted above, had called for greater attention to civil rights in part to improve the American image abroad. All in all, however, the height of the Cold War was an unfavorable time to raise questions about the imperfections of American society. In 1947, two months after the Truman Doctrine speech, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson delivered a major address defending the president’s pledge to aid “free peoples” seeking to preserve their “democratic institutions.” Acheson chose as his audience the Delta Council, an organization of Mississippi planters, bankers, and merchants. He seemed unaware that to make the case for the Cold War, he had ventured into what one historian has called the “American Siberia,” a place of grinding poverty whose black population (70 percent of the total) enjoyed neither genuine freedom nor democracy. Most of the Delta’s citizens were denied the very liberties supposedly endangered by communism. After 1948, little came of the Truman administration’s civil rights flurry. State and local laws banning discrimination in employment and housing remained largely unenforced. In 1952, the Democrats showed how quickly the issue had faded by nominating for president Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, a candidate with little interest in civil rights, with southern segregationist John Sparkman as his running mate. The following year, Hortense Gabel, director of the eminently respectable New York State Committee Against Discrimination in TH E A N TI COMMU N I S T C R U S A D E ★ 935 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Joseph R. McCarthy, Speech at Wheeling (1950) During the 1950s, the demagogic pursuit of supposed communists in government and other places of influence became known as McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. In a speech in West Virginia in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 communists working for the State Department. When he entered the speech into the Congressional Record a few days later, he reduced the number to fi fty-seven. He never named any of them. Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are d own—they are truly down. Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out peace . . . there was within the Soviet orbit 180 million people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time roughly 1.625 billion people. Today, only six years later, there are 800 million people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500 million. . . . The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful, potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst. . . . In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with communists. I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy. . . . One thing to remember in discussing the communists in our government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of new weapons. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy. From Margaret Chase Smith, Speech in the Senate (1950) Most of McCarthy’s colleagues were cowed by his tactics. One who was not was Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the Senate’s only female member. On June 1, she delivered a brief speech, along with a Declaration of Conscience, signed by six other Republican senators. 936 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity. . . . I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul searching—for us to weigh our c onsciences—on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of A merica—on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges. . . . I think that it is high time that we remembered; that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation. Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of A mericanism— The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in. The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as “Communists” or “Fascists” by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, QU E STIONS Bigotry and Smear. . . . As a United States Senator, I am not 1. What kind of social resentments are evident proud of the way in which the Senate in McCarthy’s speech? has been made a publicity platform for irresponsible sensationalism. . . . I don’t 2. What does Smith believe is the essence of freedom of speech? like the way the S enate has been made a rendezvous for vilification, for selfish 3. What do these documents suggest about political gain at the sacrifice of individual how the Cold War affected discussions of reputations and national unity. freedom in the early 1950s? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 937 Housing, reported that the shadow of fear hung over the civil rights movement. Given the persecution of dissent and the widespread sentiment that equated any criticism of American society with disloyalty, “a great many people are shying away from all activity in the civil liberties and civil rights fronts.” Time would reveal that the waning of the civil rights impulse was only temporary. But it came at a crucial moment, the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the United States experienced the greatest economic boom in its history. The rise of an “affluent society” transformed American life, opening new opportunities for tens of millions of white Americans in rapidly expanding suburbs. But it left blacks trapped in the declining rural areas of the South and urban ghettos of the North. The contrast between new opportunities and widespread prosperity for whites and continued discrimination for blacks would soon inspire a civil rights revolution and, with it, yet another redefinition of American freedom. CH A P T E R R E V I E W REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What major ideological conflicts, security interests, and events brought about the Cold War? 2. President Truman referred to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as “two halves of the same walnut.” Explain the similarities and differences between these two aspects of containment. 3. How did the tendency of both the United States and the Soviet Union to see all international events through the lens of the Cold War lessen each country’s ability to understand what was happening in other countries around the world? 4. Why did the United States not support movements for colonial independence around the world? 5. How did the government attempt to shape public opinion during the Cold War? 6. Explain the differences between the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s application of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 7. How did the anticommunist crusade affect organized labor in the postwar period? 8. What accounts for the Republican resurgence in these years? 9. What were the major components of Truman’s Fair Deal? Which ones were implemented and which ones not? 10. How did the Cold War affect civil liberties in the United States? 938 ★ CHAPTER 23 The Uni ted States and t h e C o l d Wa r KEY TERMS Cold War (p. 907) decolonization (p. 917) containment (p. 907) totalitarianism (p. 919) Long Telegram (p. 909) Fair Deal (p. 922) iron curtain (p. 909) Operation Dixie (p. 922) Truman Doctrine (p. 909) Taft-Hartley Act (p. 923) Marshall Plan (p. 911) Dixiecrats (p. 926) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (p. 912) McCarthyism (p. 928) NSC-68 (p. 914) Army-McCarthy hearings (p. 931) Korean War (p. 915) McCarran-Walter Act (p. 933) Go to Hollywood Ten (p. 929) Q IJK To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way. Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more. C H A P T E R R E V I E W ★ 939 ★ CHAPTER 24 ★ AN AFFLUENT SOCIETY 1953–1960 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What were the main characteristics of the affluent society of the 1950s? • How were the 1950s a period of consensus in both domestic policies and foreign affairs? • What were the major thrusts of the civil rights movement in this period? • What was the significance of the presidential election of 1960? I n 1958, during a “thaw” in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to exchange national exhibitions in order to allow citizens of each “superpower” to become acquainted with life in the other. The Soviet Exhibition, unveiled in New York City in June 1959, featured factory machinery, scientific advances, and other illustrations of how communism had modernized a backward country. The following month, the American National Exhibition opened in Moscow. A showcase of consumer goods and leisure equipment, complete with stereo sets, a movie theater, home appliances, and twenty-two different cars, the exhibit, Newsweek observed, hoped to demonstrate the superiority of “modern capitalism with its ideology of political and economic freedom.” Yet the exhibit’s real message was not freedom but consumption—or, to be more precise, the equating of the two. 940 ★ When Vice President Richard Nixon repared for his trip to Moscow to launch the p exhibition, a former ambassador to Russia urged him to emphasize American values: “We are idealists; they are materialists.” But the events of the opening day seemed to reverse these roles. Nixon devoted his address, entitled “What Freedom Means to Us,” not to freedom of expression or differing forms of government, but to the “extraordinarily high standard of living” in the United States, with its 56 million cars and 50 million television sets. The United States, he declared, had achieved what Soviets could only dream of—“prosperity for all in a classless society.” The Moscow exhibition became the site of a classic Cold War confrontation over the meaning of freedom—the “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Twice during the first day Nixon and Khrushchev engaged in unscripted debate about the merits of capitalism and communism. The first took place in the kitchen of a model suburban ranch house, the second in a futuristic “miracle kitchen” complete with a mobile robot that swept the floors. Supposedly the home of an average steelworker, the ranch house was the exhibition’s centerpiece. It represented, Nixon declared, the mass enjoyment of American freedom within a suburban setting— freedom of choice among products, colors, styles, and prices. It also implied a particular role for women. Throughout his exchanges with Khrushchev, Nixon used the words “women” and “housewives” interchangeably. Pointing to the automatic floor sweeper, the vice president remarked that in the United States “you don’t need a wife.” Nixon’s decision to make a stand for American values in the setting of a suburban • CHRONOLOGY • 1946 Mendez v. Westminster 1947 Levittown development starts 1950 David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd 1952 United States detonates first hydrogen bomb 1953 Soviet Union detonates hydrogen bomb CIA-led Iranian coup 1954 Brown v. Board of Education CIA-led Guatemalan coup Geneva Accords for Vietnam 1955 AFL and CIO merge Allen Ginsberg’s Howl 1955– 1956 Montgomery bus boycott 1956 “Southern Manifesto” Federal-Aid Highway Act Suez crisis 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized Integration of Little Rock’s Central High School Sputnik launched Jack Kerouac’s On the Road 1958 National Defense Education Act 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” 1960 John F. Kennedy elected president 1962 Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom • A N A F F L U E N T S O C I E T Y ★ 941 • kitchen was a brilliant stroke. Nixon recognized that “soft power”—the penetration across the globe of American goods and popular culture—was an even more potent form of influence than military might. Indeed, his stance reflected the triumph during the 1950s of a conception of freedom centered on economic abundance and consumer choice within the context of Vice President Richard Nixon, with hands folded, traditional family life—a vision that and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the “kitchen debate,” a discussion, among other seemed to offer far more opportunities things, of the m eaning of freedom, which took for the “pursuit of happiness” to men place in 1959 at the American National Exposithan women. In reply, Khrushchev tion in Moscow. Khrushchev makes a point while ridiculed consumer culture and the a woman demonstrates a washing machine. American obsession with household gadgets. “Don’t you have a machine,” he quipped, “that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down?” Many of the items on display, he continued, served “no useful purpose.” Yet, in a sense, the Soviet leader conceded the debate when he predicted—quite incorrectly— that within seven years his country would surpass the United States in the production of consumer goods. For if material abundance was a battleground in the Cold War, American victory was certain. THE GOLDEN AGE The end of World War II was followed by what one scholar has called the “golden age” of capitalism, a period of economic expansion, stable prices, low unemployment, and rising standards of living that continued until 1973. Between 1946 and 1960, the American gross national product more than doubled and much of the benefit flowed to ordinary citizens in rising wages. In every measurable way—diet, housing, income, education, recreation—most Americans lived better than their parents and grandparents had. By 1960, an estimated 60 percent of Americans enjoyed what the government defined as a middle-class standard of living. The official poverty rate, 30 percent of all families in 1950, had declined to 22 percent a decade later (still, to be sure, representing more than one in five Americans). Numerous innovations came into widespread use in these years, transforming Americans’ daily lives. They included television, home air-conditioning, 942 ★ CHAPTER 24 A n A f f l uent Soc i ety What were the main characteristics of the affluent society of the 1950s? automatic dishwashers, inexpensive long-distance telephone calls, and jet air travel. Services like electricity, central heating, and indoor plumbing that within living memory had been enjoyed only by the rich and solidly middle class now became features of common life. Between 1950 and 1973, the average real wages of manufacturing workers doubled. Wages rose faster for low-income than high-income Americans, lessening economic inequality. Significant numbers of blue-collar men were able to earn enough at an early age to marry and support a family. At the time, widespread affluence, the improving economic status of working-class men and women, and the narrowing gap between rich and poor seemed to have become a permanent feature of American society, a model for other countries to follow. History would show that this was, in fact, an exceptional moment, made possible by government policies, a strong union movement, and the country’s global economic dominance in the wake of World War II. When the long postwar boom ended in 1973 it would be succeeded by an even longer period of stagnant incomes for most Americans and increasing inequality. A Changing Economy Despite the economic recovery of western Europe and Japan after World War II, the United States remained the world’s predominant industrial power. Major industries like steel, automobiles, and aircraft dominated the domestic and world markets for their products. Like other wars, the Cold War fueled industrial production and promoted a redistribution of the nation’s population and economic resources. The West, especially the Seattle area, southern California, and the Rocky Mountain states, benefited enormously from government contracts for aircraft, guided missiles, and radar systems. The South became the home of numerous military bases and government-funded shipyards. Growth in the construction of aircraft engines and submarines counterbalanced the decline of New England’s old textile and machinery industries, many of which relocated in the South to take advantage of low-cost nonunion labor. In retrospect, the 1950s appear as the last decade of the industrial age in the United States. Since then, the American economy has shifted rapidly toward services, education, information, finance, and entertainment, while employment in manufacturing has declined. Even during the 1950s, the number of factory laborers fell slightly while clerical workers grew by nearly 25 percent and salaried employees in large corporate enterprises rose by 60 percent. Unions’ very success in raising wages inspired employers to mechanize more and more elements of manufacturing in order to reduce labor costs. In 1956, for the first time in American history, white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar factory and manual laborers. T H E G O L D E N A G E ★ 943 The long-term trend toward fewer and larger farms continued. During the 1950s, the farm population fell from 23 million to 15 million, yet agricultural production rose by 50 percent, thanks to more efficient machinery, the a pplication of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, increased use of irrigation to open land to cultivation in the West, and the development of new crop strains. The decade witnessed an acceleration of the transformation of southern life that had begun during World War II. New tractors and harvesting machinery and a continuing shift from cotton production to less labor- intensive soybean and poultry raising reduced the need for farm workers. More than 3 million black and white hired hands and sharecroppers migrated out of the region. The center of gravity of American farming shifted decisively to Texas, Arizona, and especially California. The large corporate farms of California, worked by Latino and Filipino migrant laborers, poured forth an endless supply of fruits and vegetables for the domestic and world markets. Items like oranges and orange juice, once luxuries, became an essential part of the American diet. A Suburban Nation The main engines of economic growth during the 1950s, however, were residential construction and spending on consumer goods. The postwar baby boom (discussed later) and the shift of population from cities to suburbs created an enormous demand for housing, television sets, home appliances, and cars. By 1960, suburban residents of single-family homes outnumbered urban dwellers and those living in rural areas. (Today, they outnumber both combined.) During the 1950s, the number of houses in the United States doubled, nearly all of them built in the suburbs that sprang up across the landscape. The dream of home ownership, the physical embodiment of hopes for a better life, came within reach of the majority of Americans. Developers pioneered inexpensive mass-building techniques, and government-backed low-interest loans to returning veterans allowed working-class men and women in large numbers to purchase homes. William and Alfred Levitt, who shortly after the war built the first Levittown on 1,200 acres of potato fields on Long Island near New York City, became the most famous suburban developers. Levittown’s more than 10,000 houses were assembled quickly from prefabricated parts and priced well within the reach of most Americans. Levittown was soon home to 40,000 people. At the same time, suburbs required a new form of shopping center— the mall—to which people drove in their cars. In contrast to traditional mixeduse city centers crowded with pedestrians, malls existed solely for shopping and had virtually no public space. 944 ★ CHAPTER 24 A n A f f l uent Soc i ety What were the main characteristics of the affluent society of the 1950s? The Growth of the West The modern West emerged in the postwar years. Unlike the 1930s, when most migrants to the West came from the South and the Dust Bowl states, all parts of the country now contributed to the region’s growth. Federal spending on dams, highways, and military installations helped to fuel the flow of people. So did the pleasant climate of many parts of the region, and the diffusion of air conditioning in warmer places such as Arizona and southern California. The rapid expansion of oil production (a result of the tremendous increase in automobile ownership) led to the explosive growth of urban centers connected to the oil industry such as Denver, Dallas, and Houston. But it was California that became the most prominent symbol of the postwar suburban boom. Between World War II and 1975, more than 30 million Americans moved west of the Mississippi River. One-fifth of the population growth of the 1950s occurred in California alone. In 1963, it surpassed New York to become the nation’s most populous state. Most western growth took place in metropolitan areas, not on farms. But “centerless” western cities like Houston, Phoenix, and Los Angeles differed Ernst Haas’s 1969 photograph of A lbuquerque, New Mexico, could have been taken in any one of scores of A merican communities. As cities spread out, “strips,” consisting of motels, gas stations, and nationally franchised businesses, became common. Meanwhile, older downtown business sections stagnated. T H E G O L D E N A G E ★ 945 greatly from traditional urban centers in the East. Rather than consisting of downtown business districts linked to residential neighborhoods by p ublic transportation, western cities were decentralized clusters of single-family homes and businesses united by a web of highways. The Los Angeles basin, the largest western suburban region, had once had an extensive system of trains, trolleys, and buses. But local governments dismantled these lines after World War II, and the state and federal governments replaced them with freeways for cars and trucks. Suburban

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